


Every Living Thing

by Askance



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Animal Death, Disturbing Themes, M/M, Medicinal Drug Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-07
Updated: 2013-10-07
Packaged: 2017-12-28 18:13:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 36,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/994979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askance/pseuds/Askance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When a pair of hunters on the eastern coast witness the arrival of a very disturbing omen, it isn’t long before the news hurtles across the country, piquing the interest—and fear—of people everywhere. In a matter of days, the new, safe world that Sam, Dean, and Castiel have been inhabiting is flipped upside-down. Something enormous is coming—and this time, it’s something they can’t fight.</p><p>Faced with rapidly diminishing prospects, holed up in a tiny, empty Nebraska town, they are forced to confront fears, secrets, and emotions that might have otherwise never seen the light of day. It seems every story must end somehow, and the only thing that remains to be done is to make the most of what little time they have left.</p><p>[Dean/Cas Big Bang 2013 - masterpost with artwork can be found <a href="http://steeplechasers.livejournal.com/">here</a> on livejournal.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. corvus corax; columbidae

_He's standing on a shoreline, a cliff-line, looking out. He's alone and very cold and wishes he knew where he was, where anyone was. Very cold and standing in the very-dark while the ocean growls, not a roar of waves but a growl, an animal sound, the voice of the abyss._   
  


_Where is Dean? The spray wets his hair against his face and the water thunders, ripples, surges. Surges like a ribcage filling with breath and the cliff-line begins to tremble, tremble. Where is Castiel? Oh, he doesn't want to be alone. He is very cold and so alone and standing in the very-dark and a part of him wants to lift his leg and step and tumble and be swallowed. He's riveted. A great pressure of alone-ness is squeezing at his stomach. Where are they? It is coming upward at him and it no longer seems like an ocean but more like a beast with taut embryonic blue skin and the beast growls. He tries to look up into the churning sky but the sound pushes fishhooks into the flesh beneath his eyes and yanks his face down, down. The ocean growls. He looks into the abyss._   
  


_And the abyss looks into him._   
  


And then the black night.  


* * *

  


“Well, this is less than ideal.”  


Jenna Lindburg sucks in a frustrated breath as the match in her fingers strikes, flares, and fizzes. She waves its tiny trail of smoke away and tosses it over her shoulder into the wet sand, pockmarked with the downpour.  


“Tell me about it.”  


Sophie Atwell—standing on a rock across the makeshift pyre from her partner—bounces a little on the heels of her feet, her galoshes squelching on the stone; a few sparse seaside trees bow down over her, clusters of leaves straining against the wind, a handful of soft black shadows framing her head. Her hands are shoved deep into the pockets of her raincoat, but her fingers are still numb with cold.  


They've been out here all night, and were doing just fine before the storm rolled in over the ocean. _This,_ Sophie had tried to say, _is why we don't hunt on the coast,_ but it had been Jenna's hunt, and Jenna's say; and so here they are, trying and failing to light up the body of the local beach's malevolent boardwalk ghost.  


“I could go for a stiff drink right about now,” Sophie mumbles.  


In the flickering uncertain life-and-death of another match, Jenna gives her a pointed look.  


“Do you need _help_?” Sophie bends forward at the shoulders. “We need to light this thing up before someone sees us out here. This is private property.”  


“I _know._ You've only told me a million times.”  


Jenna strikes another match—fifteen, at Sophie's count—and shelters it behind a cupped hand; the faint orange light throws shadows against her thin-boned face. And, for the fifteenth time, a gust of wind pulling in off the ocean buffets at her back, and she spits out an unintelligible curse word as the match gutters and goes out. It lands sadly in the sand with its burnt-out brethren.  


“Shit.”  


“It's not gonna light in this weather anyway.”  


Jenna holds up her hands. “Where else are we gonna do this? It's nearly midnight, there's no room in the trunk, and I'm sure as hell not strapping a pile of bones to the top of my car—”  


“It was your idea to burn them here! Don't yell at me—”  


“I'm not yelling!”  


Suddenly, from a point behind Sophie's head, there is a loud _squawk,_ and a clatter on the bark of the tree.  


Both women pause, and Sophie twists to look.  


There's a raven, nondescript, shaking out its wings on a bending branch of the tree. It eyes her in the gloomy sodium-yellow light of the boardwalk lamp, cocks its head, hops from side to side.  


“Whatever.” Sophie turns, shivering, back to her partner, who has fumbled another match from her book and is trying a sixteenth time to get it to light and hold. “We might as well just leave it here and come back in the morning when it's dry.”  


“You're out of your mind.” Miraculously, the match lights and Jenna kneels, unsteadily, bowing down over the pyre and its mossy skeleton with the tiny flame sheltered in her hand. “Somebody in one of these beach houses is gonna come walking their dog and see this shit and it'll get carted off to a morgue somewhere. And then how the hell are we supposed to put down a ghost in the middle of a morgue?”  


“You tell _me,_ Miss—Hunts While On Vacation—It's No Big Thing—”  


Another squawk, another clatter of talons behind Sophie's head.  


She swivels again to look; Jenna doesn't, focusing on murmuring to the match under her breath, willing it to catch.  


“Come on, come on.”  


There are two ravens in the tree, wet-winged, perched close to one another. Sophie frowns.  


“Are ravens nocturnal?”  


“What?”  


Before Sophie can answer, the makeshift pyre catches, and Jenna gives a shout of triumph. She cups her hands over the flame and blows on it, gently, her body angled to shelter it from the driving rain.  


“Jesus,” Sophie says, grinding the heels of her galoshes into the rock. “It's about time. That's gonna smoke like a motherfucker.”  


“As long as it burns.”  


“Hey, tomorrow can we actually do vacation stuff? Like—drink mojitos? Watch the sunset?”  


“Get down here and help me blow on this.”  


Sophie sighs and edges toward the slick drop-off of the rock, and steps down just as something fast and black whips past her head and into the tree in a burst of leaves.  


“Shit!”  


“What?”  


Sophie smacks at her head, startled, and Jenna looks up.  


Four ravens in the tree. No—five.  


“It's just birds,” Jenna says, exasperated. “Get over here.”  


Sophie makes a face at the tree. Three more ravens arrive as she turns away again, crouching down next to Jenna, pressing their shoulders together.  


Under the encouragement of their breath the fire spreads a little more, smoking angrily but burning, sheltered by their bodies and the outcropping of rock, and flames begin to lick up into the hollows of the skeleton they'd carried out of the cave at the shoreline.  


Sophie whistles lowly. “Good riddance.”  


For a few moments there is silence as the fire crackles and smolders and the two hunters warm their hands over the charred, hissing pyre.  


“And actually swim in the ocean,” Sophie says. “That's another thing. I at least need to swim in the ocean before this vacation's over or else it won't count, and I'm dragging you camping to make up for it whether you like it or not—”  


Low thunder rumbles behind them, over the curling, hissing waves, and then there is a sudden and almighty rush of wings, and a tumble of black feathers hurtles out of the angry sky directly over their heads. Sophie shouts, and they both duck forward, faces dangerously close to the fire, and then Jenna topples backward into the sand, her hood askew, her dark hair clinging to her cheek.  


“What the fuck?” she snaps, but Sophie doesn't answer. She's getting unsteadily to her feet, leaning sideways over the pyre to peer up into the tree.  


It's become a cacophony of bird-noise, the birds themselves indistinguishable from the clusters of wet leaves except by the flash of their slick feathers, the sharp sound of their talons, the grating calls in their throats.  


“Holy crap,” she says.  


There must be dozens of them, so many that the lower branches of the tree are bowing under their weight, and all of them moving so frantically that it's impossible to count them. Sophie clambers back up onto the rock to get a better look.  


“ _Jesus._ Jen.”  


“What?”  


Sophie grips a slab of stone to keep her balance and makes her slippery way around the outcropping of rock. It's easier, now, to see all the trees on this bit of land, and every single one is swarming with ravens and the sounds of them, deafening even beneath the storm.  


“This is friggin' Hitchcock,” Sophie shouts over her shoulder. “Jenna, you gotta see this.”  


Jenna curses, but leaves the pyre and climbs up next to Sophie, taking hold of her arm for balance.  


She tilts her head back to look and her mouth opens, but she says nothing. She isn't really sure what to say.  


As far as they can see in the gloomy cast of the boardwalk light, in the trees and hopping on the ground, keeping to the shelter offered by the rustling leaves, the nighttime is full of ravens, their beady eyes and glistening oil-black wings, congregating on the branches of the beach. A litany of sharp dark beaks pointed like so many arrowheads protruding from the vast mass of them.  


The women watch as a slash of lightning lights up the roiling water, and at the sound of its following thunder the ravens fall suddenly quiet, and all—hundreds of them—all turn to face the ocean, and become still.  


“Well,” says Sophie, “that's not normal.”  


* * *

  


In a single night they swarm the East Coast of North America from the furthest inhabited beaches of Canada down to the Florida Keys, a massive line of black birds in the shape of the sands and swells, in trees and on docks, on rooftops and boardwalks, perching atop the masts of sailing boats like inky St Elmo's Fire. The following day, absolutely nothing scares them away. Air cannons are set off at all hours, pointed into the trees and out towards the sea, but they remain, sometimes conversing in their gravelly avian language, but more often silent—silent and unnervingly still.  


When dusk falls again they face the ocean, as if waiting for orders.  


Jenna Lindburg doesn't say anything about the moment of the birds' arrival when she and her partner leave the coast, but Sophie isn't so quiet. From her lips at a local bar the details of the gathering reach the ears of a demonologist on his way up to New York; he in turn passes the story on to a clan of vampire hunters with whom he stops to get directions on a lonely Maryland back road.  


The youngest of that group, two days after the event, makes a call to a friend in California to discuss the strangeness, and while news networks begin to pick up on the phenomenon, call in ornithologists by the dozens, play video clips of the festering broods of birds at the end of every television cycle, bandy about words like _climate change_ and _scientific reasoning,_ the other interpretation begins to spread, like a line of wildfire through the roadhouses and motels where hunters sleep and eat and clean their guns.  


It reaches Sam Winchester's cell phone at three in the morning in the form of an mp4 video clip and a single-word text from an old contact in Delaware.  


_Omen?_   
  


He doesn't see the message until the next afternoon; at three in the morning he's knee-deep in the filth of a rawhead's hideaway, nursing a sprained ankle with a spent Taser in his hand, while Dean and Castiel bundle the heavy body up the stairs to burn it in the fields. At four in the morning he's sitting sideways in the Impala while Dean wraps an Ace bandage around his foot and Cas sleeps in the backseat, and at five in the morning they're all out cold on the motel beds, and the unread message screen blinks on Sam's untouched cell periodically while the sun rises and they sleep on.  


When Sam finally checks his phone, four mouthfuls into a Caesar salad at the dinette the next afternoon, he doesn't expect the hellish racket that accompanies the mp4 clip when he hits _play._ Dean jumps with surprise as the cackling sound bursts out of the speakers of the phone, and Cas scrunches up his face in confusion and curiosity, burger halfway to his mouth.  


“The fuck is that?” Dean says, leaning over the table. Sam frowns and hits _play_ again, turns his hand to show the video to the others.  


“Amos in Delaware sent it,” he says. Dean and Cas peer at the tiny pixelated screen.  


It's only a thirty-second video, a shaky panorama of what looks like a beach absolutely bristling with black birds, making an almighty bone-shaking sound, like the laughter of something dead. An air cannon goes off somewhere in the far digital distance and then the video ends, and the text flashes up again: _omen?_  
  


“Omen,” Cas says, frowning. “Omen of what?”  


Sam shrugs, pulls his phone back, looks down at it. “No idea.”  


“What's Amos expect us to do about it?” Dean gets up, pushing his chair back with a scrape, to throw his styrofoam takeaway box in the trash. “It's just a bunch of birds.”  


Cas squints at Sam's phone until Sam pushes it into his pocket again, and the subject is dropped. There's a ghost in Oklahoma that needs taking care of, anyway, and none of them want anything to do with ornithological strangeness on the coast.  


 

* * *

 

For the last two years life has been, if not easy, then at least _simple—_ cut-and-dry, run-of-the-mill. Hunt after hunt after hunt. They've been in almost perpetual motion twelve months of the year, moving from one milestone to another—Cas fell very quietly a year and a half ago; Dean was laid up with a broken leg all of the previous June; Sam took out an entire nest of vampires on his own and nearly got himself killed in the process the day after Christmas—without much ceremony, without the intrusion of anything Big and Bad. Post-Apocalypse, the movers and shakers of the paranormal world seem quite content to let the three of them alone, and Dean especially wouldn't have it any other way.  


While his brother and best friend finish eating, he pulls his duffel onto the cheap motel coverlet of his bed and begins to pack away his things. It's a tiring life, but it has ceased to be exhausting, and Dean has to admit to being a little proud of how far they've come from angels and demons and battlefields in graveyards. Sam smiles easy, and talks about the future and online schools, and Cas is settled into the human way of things, more or less. They're good. And Dean is good, and that, he thinks, is what matters. Dean pushes his rolled-up jeans into a corner of the duffel and thinks that if things stay this way—keep looking up, keeping them busy, doing the job without the job doing them in—he'll be happy to live this way for as long as the life will let him.  


They load up, Sam limping a little on his ankle, and push south to Oklahoma. Sam doesn't text Amos back, but keeps the mp4 in his inbox, and scrolls over and past it every now and then while the countryside speeds by.  


* * *

  


Kent Cane, resident kelpie-and-selkie specialist of the Oregon coast, is the one who first sees the ravens come to the West, exactly a week after the swarm in the East. By morning the roadhouses and truck stops from Washington to Arizona are humming with the news, and the word keeps spinning upward, bigger and blacker as the birds box in the country along the water: _omen._ It spreads across the tenuous connections of the hunting network's web, landing in email inboxes and voicemails.  


By the time the ghost in Oklahoma has been laid to rest, even ignoring the mp4 on Sam's cell phone isn't enough to keep the worry at a distance outside the dingy motel in Tulsa where they're holed up, waiting for wind of another job.  


“Isn't there anything else to talk about besides the damn birds?” Dean snaps, jamming his thumb down hard on the remote control as if by pushing it hard enough he can squeeze the news reports off the screen. Every one of the fifteen free channels on the motel television is occupied by the same grainy footage of the goddamn ravens, and the incessant clatter of their song has begun to grate on all of them.  


Cas—who put in earphones as soon as Dean turned on the television an hour ago, the better to read at the table without the racket of the birds on the news—doesn't respond. Sam sighs, looking despondently at the twenty new emails—some forwarded, some direct, all about the ravens, that are crowding the top of his inbox.  


“Someone needs to find a damn augur already and stop pestering us,” Sam grumbles, opening one of the emails and skimming it before hitting _delete._ “I've been scouring every source I have for days, I'm no help to anyone.” He shifts, foot brushing Cas' under the table.  
  


“Augur?”  


“Bird omen specialist.”  


“I knew that.” Dean turns off the TV with an electric pop and stretches out across the bed, covering his face with his hands.  


Sam reaches across the table to tap Castiel's arm, let him know that the noise is turned off, and Cas pulls the earphones he borrowed from Sam out. A tinny hum of loud classical music shivers through them.  


“Anything on?” he asks, turning his head to Dean.  


“Birds, birds, birds.”  


Cas returns to his reading for a few moments, chin in his hand, while Sam finishes clearing his email. His face is thoughtful, twisted-up.  


Sam glances at him over the edge of his laptop. “What's up?”  


“It feels familiar,” Cas says, frowning.  


“What, the birds?” Dean asks, voice muffled by his hands, from the bed.  


“I can't place it. But yes.”  


“When, in your ridiculously long life, did birds ever do weird things?” Dean says. “Besides _all the time_.”  


Cas furrows his brow and closes his book. “It's not the birds that feel familiar,” he says, looking out the window, through the slatted blinds at the last pink of the sun going down over the city. “It's ravens specifically.”  


“Do ravens mean something?” Sam asks, yawning and shutting his laptop. “To angels?”  


“It's on the tip of my tongue,” Cas says.  


“Well, don't strain yourself,” Dean mumbles. “It's probably nothing. You know how paranoid hunters are.”  


They settle in, in the strange uncommon absent space between being on a job and waiting for the next; it's Sam's turn to share with Cas, and Cas lies awake next to him for most of the night, staring at the ceiling, trying to place the ravens. He drifts off somewhere in the early hours, the catalogue of his life still rolling over in his head, without any answer.  


He's woken only once more, and only for a minute, a little after three in the morning, to see Sam's eyes twitching under their lids in the blue light, his face pulled up in restless nightmare fear. Cas touches his wrist for a moment before he falls away again.  


* * *

  


The next morning all the radio can talk about is birds. They've appeared, overnight, on the coasts of England and Ireland and France, Norway and Sweden, in overwhelming numbers, and as Sam clicks through emails and texts and Dean searches fruitlessly for a TV channel that will show him something other than wings, Cas sits out on the second-story walkway of the motel, legs stuck through the metal bars and dangling barefoot over the parking lot, thinking.  


It's been a hot summer, and the bars are cool against his forehead. Across the parking lot and the quiet road grackles are congregating on a phone wire, like black paper cut-outs against the throbbing white sky. Not ravens. He wonders idly if there are any ravens _left_ in the middle parts of the country, if they've all flown out to the coasts, the oceans and gulfs, for their enigmatic reasons. Coming together like wary worshippers on a Sunday to pay homage to the sea.  


It's bothering him, more than it should, that he can't quite place why they feel familiar. Cas rests his head against the opening between the bars, chipped and rusted paint framing his temples, and frowns at the grackels across the street. He knows the boys aren't interested in what it might be—are ready simply for this strangeness to either die down or show itself plainly, with no riddles in between—but it's been five days since that mp4 clip landed in Sam's cell phone inbox and he's spent every one of them wracking his brains for where ravens have been before.  


Romans used to read signs in the flight patterns of birds. He remembers that. He'd always found it to be a fascinating, if pagan, practice—had more than once glanced down at an augur searching the skies to observe until he was called back by some member of his old garrison. But augury is a dead ritual, and these birds aren't flying. They're waiting.  


Cas wishes, briefly, that he still had the ability to lift his own wings and be in another place at whim. He'd fly to the coast and listen hard to the chattering of the black beaks in the seaside trees, to see if what they said made any sense to his human ears.  


He sighs, curling his fingers loosely around the bars of the walkway. The days of understanding foreign tongues as well as he understands his own—let alone the strange throaty calls of animals—are gone.  


Ravens. Ravens. If only something else would happen, he thinks, if only their behaviour would change, shift in one direction or another, he might be able to recall where in his memory ravens _meant_ something.  


“You okay out here?”  


He doesn't turn to meet Dean's voice but leans back, pulling his legs up from between the walkway bars. “Yes.”  


Dean comes to lean on the flimsy partition, arms crossed, squinting in the bright sun. A few of the grackels take off from the telephone line across the street.  


“I can't stop thinking about the birds,” Cas says. “It's frustrating.”  


Dean snorts, shifts his shoulders. “Can't stay on any one TV channel or radio station for more than ten minutes before someone brings them up again.”  


“You could read a book.”  


Dean laughs, lightly, and looks down at him, at the squinted, concentrated look on Cas' face, at his eyes fixated on the black silhouettes of the grackels as if hoping to discern something from their shapes. It's the same look he's been wearing since that first damn text message.  


What's more, he thinks—hearing a chair grate from inside the motel room, a signal of Sam's movement—Cas isn't the only one who's distracted. Sam's been quiet and sort of morose all day, as if stumbling under the weight of bad dreams. It's a silence and a melancholy that Dean remembers from the days of premonitions and chosen children, and it puts a bad taste in his mouth. The sooner they get a lead on another case and occupy themselves with salt and sinister things, the better.  


“Look, don't stress out about it,” he says, lifting his face back up to the heat of the day. “It's not our problem, and you need to keep your head in the job, not in the rumour mill. Yeah?”  


Cas hauls himself to his feet and blinks the sunspots from his eyes.  


“Yeah.”  


“Come on.” Dean claps him on the shoulder and draws him back inside to the cool dark and rattling air conditioner of the room, away from the pulsating sun and thoughts of the birds on the sea.  


“Did I ever teach you how to play Crazy Eights? Nothing on the damn television, might as well play cards.”  


 

* * *

 

The sky turns sour and dark in the early evening, the sick dull blue of an impending storm, and Sam—feeling increasingly anxious the longer he sits and stares at emails pouring into his inbox—sits by the window, watching it roll in overhead from the west.  


Cas is reading in bed, and Dean is out on the walkway, talking to someone in Houston about a potential poltergeist, and his pacing body is the only thing that cuts across Sam's field of vision, pushes away the sky for a moment. The air is thick and poised and hot and humming and it makes little nervous prickles rise and fall on Sam's arms and across his drumming fingers.  


“Did you ever figure out why the ravens feel familiar?” he asks, feeling muffled and heavy. He sees Dean laugh on the phone and hears it faintly through the window.  


Cas looks up from where he is paging through the Book of Mormon with absent interest. “No.”  


Cas glances at Sam's body angled in the chair, all tight joints; his leg is jarring up and down and his shoulders are pulled in taut.  


He frowns. “Are you alright?”  


Sam rubs at his eyes, turning away from the window, from Dean and the curling clouds. “Yeah,” he says, pushing his closed laptop away from him across the table—he can't help but imagine all the blinking black subject lines that are still crowding his email even while the computer hibernates. Being unworried about the coastal phenomenon, and being hounded by everyone else who _is,_ is almost making him more nervous than the phenomenon itself. “Didn't sleep well.”  


“Bad dreams?” Cas returns to his book, running a fingertip down a glossy inset picture on one of the slick center pages in the spine.  


“Yeah.”  


Cas doesn't press him further, and Sam's glad he doesn't. He himself can't remember their contents very well—only that they'd frightened him, and linger like vertigo at the back of his head. Something to do with trees, though; that much has stuck.  


Trees snapping and hurtling away.

  


Dean comes in with the loud metallic sound of the door opening and snaps Sam out of his reverie. A receding gust of humid air pushes into the room and then falls back again.  


“Job?” Sam asks, hoping for a _yes._  
  


“Yeah, that poltergeist in Houston's legit. We should head down in the morning.” Dean pockets his cell.  


“Not tonight?”  


“Nah, weather looks nasty. It'll keep.” Dean glances at Cas and raises an eyebrow. “The Book of Mormon, dude? Seriously?”  


Cas looks up and smiles softly, and as Dean crosses the room his eyes slip to Sam again—the jarring in Sam's leg is more pronounced. He looks as if every part of him itches, as if he'd like nothing more than to get up and bolt somewhere until all his nervous energy is worked out of him.  


While Dean makes a run to the gas station for cheap food, Cas quietly searches through his duffel for the prescription sedatives that, a year and a half ago, he had picked up to help ease his sleep. Becoming human had been silent but difficult, and nightmares and insomnia had plagued him for weeks before he had learned how to tune in to his empty vessel's unused Circadian rhythm; the pills worked to quiet the dreams, at least. Most of the bottle remains, full of little white pills, and he puts it on the table next to Sam's elbow with a gentle smile, and Sam looks up at him with something of gratitude and embarrassment.  


* * *

  


Much to Castiel's happiness, Sam is bright-eyed and rested the next morning, and they leave Oklahoma on streets still smelling of rain, still stained dark with the remnants of the summer storm. The hot morning creeps across their faces even with the windows down, and Cas hangs over the middle of the front seat, chin on the leather, watching the highway roll up and under.  


Cas likes traveling days, the rollicking way of them, the hours spent in idle conversation or in playing the alphabet game with the brothers, who know nearly every tract of empty road and every landmark so well that they almost end up winning by default. From the low-slung car, the countryside, to him, always seems endless and green, or golden and folding, into hills and valleys, plains and prairies, and gazing at them fills a kind of hunger in him—to know the endless movement that defines the two men he loves most. It's becoming his life, too. Has been for the last two years, and while he sometimes misses Heaven and the songs of his siblings in the back of his head, he loves the freedom that comes with the curving straits of asphalt, the smell of gasoline, the click and clatter of the tape deck. Unfettered. And it seems, especially from this vantage point, watching the Impala's hood eating up the ground, that there is an infinite amount of space to move in, to see, to know.  


Dean manages to find a station that isn't gabbling about the birds and sings along to every song he knows, obnoxious and loud, and his voice carries them over the Texas border.  


They're thirty minutes onto a lonely stretch of I-35 when something hits the windshield.  


Dean swerves, cursing, and they slip onto the side of the road where the corrugated concrete makes the Impala's wheels groan, and brakes hard; Sam smacks his head into the window and hisses in pain and the car lurches to a stop. A circular crack is spider-webbing across the center of the plane of glass.  


“The hell was that?” Dean says, popping the door before either Sam or Cas can answer, and they crane their heads to watch him walk back up the hot road, his figure outlined against the empty countryside and the dim beating sky. He stoops to look at something on the asphalt and Cas sticks his head out the open window to call after him.  


“Was it a bird?”  


“Yeah,” Dean says, and then mutters something unintelligible to himself, and kicks something dead and grey with a flopping wing out of the road and into the ditch. A bright point of blood marks the middle of the highway like a pin in a map.  


“At least it wasn't a raven,” Sam mutters.  


Dean climbs back into the car and swears when he sees the crack in the windshield, and pulls them back out onto the road, all his earlier good mood gone. Sam and Cas settle into their seats in silence.  


“We'll pull off at the next rest stop. See where the nearest town is with an auto body shop,” Dean mutters.  


Cas rolls up the window, feeling suddenly exposed. The scenery feels less open now than it did before, as if it's crowding in toward the highway, narrowing, to stare at them.  


Dean makes the exit for the rest stop twenty minutes later, and almost immediately something bounces off the hood of the Impala and hurtles away, and Dean brakes to a stop again, the car rocking. “Jesus Christ,” he grinds out—and then something else hits the hood—and then the roof, like colossal drops of rain, and all three of them duck instinctively at the sound of it landing over their heads.  


The thing on the hood is, quite clearly, a bird—another grey bird, with twisted, tortured legs and broken wings, one black eye upturned towards the heavy, brooding sky.  


Sam opens his mouth to say something but there's a sickening _smack_ as another one lands on the street at Dean's right, and then another up ahead, and without saying anything else Dean guns it down the rest stop road to a lurching halt beneath a portico, and they all clamber out and turn around to see.  


It's raining birds—grey birds plummeting out of the sky and into the ground like dive-bombers, like kamikaze flights, a hellish hail of turbulent wings and the mortifying sounds of impact. Someone shouts from behind them, in the dead grass, and Cas swivels to see a family of four abandoning their picnic at the rest stop table and running, arms over their heads, under the same portico that shelters the trio.  


“What the hell is this?” Dean demands, watching with horror as the birds dive into the road like tiny feathered meteors, killing themselves with abandon in the dozens—in the hundreds—a shower of them all along the highway and pounding on the portico, and lying crippled and broken in tiny morbid puddles of their blood.  


Sam looks as if he's going to be sick.  


The youngest child of the family of four begins to cry, and they all move hastily inside the little building that houses the vending machines and toilets, a darker safer shelter. A bird lands just feet from the toes of Dean's boots and he takes a startled step back, the hem of his jeans spattered with dark blood, and then Sam _is_ sick, turns his body away from his brother and friend and vomits onto the parking lot.  


Still they rain, grey birds, and Cas sits down on the curb while Dean leads Sam, their bodies hunched, into the dirty bathroom to clean his mouth. They come down in droves for what feels hours, but is probably only minutes, and when they stop it's as abruptly as when they began.  


Cas swallows hard, feeling hollow-boned and namelessly afraid, and stares at the carnage. Little feathered bodies as far as he can see, down fluttering in the tumid breeze. The obscene quiet of the world seems to stretch for miles.  


Slowly, he gets to his feet, hearing the metal clang of the bathroom door opening as Sam and Dean re-emerge, and crouches down beside the one that spattered Dean's shoes. With delicate fingers he pulls a mangled wing sideways, open, over, and touches the smashed head, the tiny beak. He recognizes it, maimed as it is. He knows it.  


His throat feels thick and closed. _Columbidae._ Not a white wedding dove by any stretch of the imagination, but a dove all the same.  


For miles back on the empty road there are little greyish heaps that are all alike. He'd be willing to bet all of them are from the same clade.  


Sam and Dean stumble back into the parking lot with him, and Sam leans against the Impala. He looks shivery, weak, shocked. Dean looks simply confused, and steps out from under the portico to take in the wreckage.  


A living bird, a sparrow, maybe, lands nearby and observes a carcass with a tilted head before it flies away again. Overhead, black on the torpid white sky, vultures begin to circle.  


Dean turns back to look at Cas, crouched by the dead thing, wiping his thumb and forefinger on his jeans.  


Cas has a dreadful notion that tonight on the local news there will be less talk of congregating ravens and more talk of suicidal doves, plummeting into the countryside, crashing into windshields. He feels, suddenly, repulsed, and stands up, retreating to Sam's side against the car.  


“Doves,” he says grimly as Dean comes back to the Impala, and Dean looks at him with equal grimness. Unsure of what else to do, they get back into the car and back out over the crunching bodies of the birds in the road, and Sam covers his face with his hands, pale.  


They don't make it to Houston. Instead they bunk up in the first motel that appears, having driven for twenty or thirty miles over the seemingly endless minefield of the feathered dead, cracking tiny bones and skulls with nightmarish regularity. The first thing Sam does when they've booked a room from a spooked-looking young woman at the front desk is be sick again, and then he knocks back three of Castiel's sleeping pills and crawls, unsteady, under the covers of the bed near the door.  


Dean mutes the television for Sam's sake, but the news that runs silently across the screen is just as Castiel suspected. Anchormen and women mouth statistics and scientific classifications and cameras pan across the roads and fields pockmarked with tiny carcasses and no one, it seems, arrives at any kind of conclusion. Question marks in white text litter the titles of every story.  


Sam's cell lights up with buzzing texts and Dean's does, too. Eventually Dean snatches them both up and pushes them into his duffel bag, muffled among clothes, and the sky darkens, tipping into night.  


Cas sits idle and thoughtful until Dean goes to bed and then takes his designated place beside him, unwilling to be Sam's bedmate in case he has to be sick again, but he doesn't sleep. _Corvus corax, columbidae._ Ravens and doves, one mass of blackness standing vigil on the oceans and one pox of grey and white blemishing the highways and the farmers' fields in death and broken beaks. _Corvus corax, columbidae,_ specific and portentous.  


He wakes, without realising he'd fallen asleep in the first place, at five in the morning, and gets out of bed.  


The motel Bible is in the top drawer of the lopsided bureau and he pulls it out, holding its cardboard-backed weight in his hands. As he passes the foot of the beds to go into the bathroom he pauses, looks over at Sam, who is trembling in his sleep, turning restlessly.  


Cas closes the bathroom door behind him and waits for the dim bulbs above the mirror to fade up, and sits on the edge of the bathtub. Genesis falls open over his knees as if it's waiting for him.  


_At the end of forty days Noah opened the window of the ark that he had made and sent out the raven; and it went to and fro until the waters were dried up from the Earth. Then he sent out the dove from him, to see if the waters had subsided from the face of the ground; but the dove found no place to set its foot, and it returned to him to the ark, for the waters were still on the face of the whole Earth._   
  


Cas can feel his heart falling, slowly, into his stomach, beating the slow tattoo of a drum.  


There. This is what he has been trying to remember. The Great Flood.  


He'd been little more than a fledgling bird himself, back then, had been confused by the sadness that seized the archangels while the Earth below them slowly curled into a deep and endless blue, devouring itself and everything on it. There.  


Ravens and doves: the symbols of the deluge.  


And now—he shuts the Bible and places it gently on his knees—now, ravens, lining the edges of the oceans. Doves, now, breaking themselves apart on the ground, on the roads. The Delaware contact had been right.  


Omens.  


Cas gets up, feeling as if all his limbs are made of stone, and goes back into the room; he shakes Dean awake as the sunrise is creeping up outside, rising over what's left of the second event, the second warning. Dean opens his eyes with a noise of frustration, but when he sees the blankness on Castiel's face, his own face falls.  


“What's the matter?” he whispers, sitting up, casting a glance at Sam, whose nightmares seem to have stilled.  


Cas sits down on the mattress and opens the Bible again, points to the Genesis verse, and Dean holds it close to his face, squints to read.  


When he's done he sets it down on his covered legs and looks at Cas, lips open, their bow afraid.  


“I knew it felt familiar,” Cas says. “I knew it didn't feel right.”  


“I thought—” Dean pauses, lowers his voice again, his anxious eyes darting back and forth across Sam's curled-up sleeping body. “I thought the whole point of that story was that God was never gonna do that again.”  


“I could be wrong,” Cas says, looking down at the flimsy pages, thinking of the acres of dead doves and the black chattering against the tide. “I pray that I'm wrong.”  


“But if you're not?”  


“It's the only thing that makes sense,” he says, pulling the Bible away from Dean's lap and closing it over the text as if trying to close the possibility away inside. “At least in my mind.”  


He looks across the room, over the concave valley of Sam's side to the dusty sunrise—imagines a wash of darkness, of liquid black, obscuring the phone lines, the cars, swallowing everything up in perfect abyssal silence, in the ink of the risen ocean.  


“I think the Flood may be coming again,” he says, and it makes it feel so terribly true, to hear it out loud, that he wishes he could steal the words back into his mouth. He looks down at the Bible in his hands, all the apocalypses contained within it, and hears Sam begin to breathe awake as the sun comes in.  


Sam stirs, sits up. Looks at them and their fear, and furrows his brow. Abruptly, Castiel finds, the air begins to taste of salt.


	2. the skylight room

Sam doesn't say anything for a long time, that morning. He rolls the tips of his fingers together, tugs at them as if trying to pop them out of joint. The sun has risen muggy and unpleasant and he doesn't quite feel that he's left sleep behind—he'd been having morning dreams of howling skies and towering abysses and been woken to Dean and Castiel anxiously whispering. Hardly a true transition into waking up. He feels almost that if he can just sort through what Cas has told him in the hour since opening his eyes, think about it hard enough press it past the sharp point of logic until the dream-sense of it dissolves, maybe he'll wake up.  
  


But he _is_ awake, and the longer Castiel sits across the motel table from him with a few fingers splayed across the open pages of Genesis and the more Dean paces over the knobby green carpet the more that becomes clear. It's morning. Crews with beeping vehicles are moving on the pale grey street below to clear it of dead doves in some kind of methodical and morbid harvest, and Castiel has a hunch that the first great apocalypse of mankind might be on its way again.  
  


Cas is adamant that it's _only_ a hunch, and he says it enough that morning, laces that caveat into everything that comes from his mouth. Sam thinks that maybe he recognises how absurd and frightening that idea is and wants to lean on rationale for as long as he can before it crumbles. It's a feeling both Winchesters know well.  
  


“So let me get this straight,” Sam says finally, and Dean stops pacing to sit down on one of the beds. Cas bites his lip and closes the Bible. “You think—that since there's all this strange activity with these ravens and these doves that—they're harbingers. Of the Great Flood.”  
  


“If they were any other birds, I wouldn't,” Cas says, hunching his shoulders in apology. “If it were—bluebirds on the shore and blackbirds in the roads I wouldn't think twice. But these are specific species. I don't know what else to think.”  
  


“If you're onto something,” Sam says—knuckles rapping softly and anxiously now against the tabletop—“then that—”  
  


“Is some serious shit,” Dean finishes, as blunt as the strike of an axe, and Sam ducks his head.  
  


He doesn't say what they're all thinking—serious shit, yes, and the kind of serious shit that is far beyond their paygrade as hunters and human beings. A flood divinely driven is still a flood, a force of nature, and it can't be shot or decapitated or incapacitated, can't be hurled into Hell out of love, and that prospect is worrisome.  
  


“I don't want to jump to conclusions,” Castiel says carefully. “It's only a theory.”  
  


Sam glances down out the window at the men in yellow gloves and hard hats who are picking little dove-corpses up off the ground, gingerly, moving down the road in a steady line like farmers turning over their fields, in strips and currents. He wishes something would begin to feel real, to break up the ugly weightless feeling he still has, of being asleep. Serious shit for nine in the morning. His eyes feel heavy in his skull.  
  


“We'll feel it out,” Dean says; he sounds very far away. “Play this close to the vest until we get something more tangible.”  
  


“And then what?” Sam asks. “If Cas is on to something, what are we going to do? Build an ark?” That makes him laugh, briefly and without mirth. He puts his face in his hands, elbows on the table. There's a little flutter in his chest that he recognises as fear, sleep-fear; sometimes he wakes in the middle of the night from an unremembered nightmare and feels that, a desperate thumping of his heartbeat and a tremble in his center. Serious, serious shit. He imagines, absurdly, the three of them building a giant boat in the middle of Texas, watching the skies for storm, and wants very much to go to sleep again.  
  


Dean leaves his question unanswered.  
  


Mutually they all decide that Houston is pointless. None of them say anything about its nearness to the Gulf but all of them feel it, a sudden and violent revulsion like bile rising into their throats. Dean says that as soon as the roads are clear they'll head up north, but doesn't say where. Cas goes outside to watch the workers harvest doves, but not before he watches Sam fumble open the bottle of sedatives and take enough to knock him out for the rest of the day. His hands tremble, but he sleeps. Dean, worried in his teeth, keeps the room dark as the afternoon rises in a hot and angry streak across the sky.  
  


* * *

  
  


“Sam raises a valid point,” Cas says, when Dean joins him out on the walkway. He sits down next to him, legs lazy-spread forward, leaning against the outer wall of the motel room. Most of the workers have moved further downtown, and if it weren't for the few unretrieved doves on the roof of the supermarket across the road, it'd be hard to tell that anything unusual had happened at all.  
  


Dean grunts his returning question, turns his face towards the closed door as if to test the air for Sam's nightmares inside.  
  


“If I'm right,” Cas says, “and I pray I'm desperately wrong—what are we going to do?”  
  


Dean shrugs. He's still trying to puzzle that out himself. The topic's only existed for six hours, by his count, and it's too big for his shoulders right now.  
  


The entire universe seems to be popping and sizzling with heat, and he thinks he could almost watch the weeds in the parking lot groan and burn and die with time-lapse haste if he sat out here long enough. There's a sheen of sweat on Castiel's throat that he's trying very hard to ignore, brightening the curve of his neck and the tendons in it. Things like that remind him of how human Cas is now, how tangible, how real, a person with blood and breath who doesn't up and leave on a whim anymore. He's been this way for a year and a half but it still depresses Dean sometimes, remembering just how much different that makes him. A complete removal of the self, really. It can't have been easy for him. He's a new creature now, a familiar one with a familiar anatomy. He cries, he bleeds, he sweats in the blistering sun, just like Dean, like Sam, and Dean tries to ignore all those things in the same way that he tries to ignore the protective instinct that uncoils in him when it comes to Castiel these days.  
  


This is a man who remembers the Great Flood as if it happened yesterday; he's not something that needs to be coddled. So maybe it's not an instinct to protect. Maybe it's something else that Dean isn't quite comfortable finding a name for yet. Either way, they're here, and not for the first time Castiel has a world's end in the back of his throat and that's familiar, too.  
  


“We'll feel it out,” Dean says, fighting past the heat on his tongue. By God, the sky is heavy. The spaces between his knuckles feel swollen and sticky.  
  


Castiel swallows and that sheen of sweat moves with the motion of his throat and Dean watches him wipe it away with the back of his hand, sigh, shift.  
  


“What are we going to say to people?” Cas looks at him, his blue eyes turning like the roll of a pistol's chamber and pushing in like pins.  
  


Dean frowns at the parking lot. “What do you mean?”  
  


Cas makes a scoffing sound in his throat and Dean thinks of the apocalypse back there against his esophagus. “We're not going to keep something like this to ourselves.”  
  


“It's not even a _something_ yet. It's just an idea.”  
  


“Recall that in our long and combined experiences ideas almost _always_ turn out to be somethings.”  
  


Dean closes his eyes. Somewhere in the exhausted quiet a car alarm goes off and the sun is a throb on his face. In this drought-heat he can't imagine that any water exists in the world, let alone enough to overwhelm and drown it all.  
  


“Hunters might believe it,” he says. “Maybe some civilians. The Y2K crowd. Might save them. Everyone else would be fucked.” The afterechoes of light in technicolour streams coil and ribbon behind his eyelids. “People just don't believe in Acts of God like that anymore.”  
  


Cas doesn't say anything, but Dean can almost feel him biting his tongue.  
  


“Those pills Sammy's taking,” Dean says, after a little bit of quiet in which the car alarm stops blaring and the distant sound of a truck reversing takes its place. “Did you give him those?”  
  


“He's having trouble sleeping.”  
  


Dean opens his eyes again. His hand is loosely lying on the dirty concrete near the corner of the door. Not close enough to his fitful baby brother for comfort. They'll go inside soon. “You think he's okay?”  
  


Cas touches his shoulder for a split second before both of them draw sluggishly away from each other. Too hot for physical contact, but the ghosts of his fingerprints linger. “He'll be fine. It's probably just a run of bad dreams.”  
  


“He used to have really bad dreams,” Dean says. Three in the morning, like clockwork, he remembers, Sam shooting up out of bed screaming Jessica's name so hoarsely it didn't even have syllables. Premonitions after that. Hell, after that, later. Sometimes he wishes he could reach into Sam's brain and turn off the mechanism that makes him see things in his sleep. He hopes they aren't a chronic condition; dreams are the one sickness he's never been able to cure in him.  
  


“He'll be fine,” Cas says again, gentler. He drags his fingers across Dean's arm again and gets to his feet, and Dean does too, feeling the damp suggestion of his touch a little too distinctly on his T-shirt sleeve, wondering if it's only sticking in the heat, if that's why. The shine of Castiel's sweat on his throat vanishes when he moves into the darkness of the room.  
  


* * *

  
  


Neither of them bother to wake Sam up that night, but settle in, anxious to be gone with morning to a place where the blood and brains of suicide birds haven't painted the streets. Dean takes a long, cold shower, and Cas reads Genesis over and over until the tiny black letters begin to crawl and shimmer in front of his tired eyes, shiver like ants. He puts the Bible aside when Dean flops down on the bed next to him and sleeps almost immediately, on top of the covers, one arm thrown over his forehead.  
  


Cas curls up on top the covers as well, back to Dean, facing the window and Sam's bed. The occasional chilly blast of wind from the air conditioner raises the hair on his bare arms like the breath of something cold, sticky-frigid and artificial and only banishing the heat for a few spare instants at a time before it lays down thick again like the tongue of a cat.  
  


He's still awake when Sam shifts, and Cas watches him sit up in the slow achy way of one who's slept too long. His knees are mountains under the covers and he bends forward over them a little, heels of his hands in his eyes. Then he turns his face to the window, disappears behind the elegant curve of his throat and the limp joint of his shoulder, and stays that way, looking, staring.  
  


“Sam,” Cas whispers, unsure if he is asleep or awake. Sam doesn't respond.  
  


The prescription bottle is on the nightstand beside Sam's bed and Castiel's eyes drift to it, and then back to his bluish silhouette outlined like a shadowbox figurine against the closed curtains. Traffic on the street below. It must be one in the morning. A little bit of worry creeps out of Castiel's throat and beneath his tongue. He stares at Sam and Sam stares at something else, something further.  
  


Eventually Sam relaxes and unfolds and lies back down, without a sound, and seems to sleep again. Cas slips out of bed and takes the bottle of pills in his hand and tiptoes across the knobby green carpet to hide them in a pocket of his duffel. They're the worry. A bad idea.  
  


* * *

  
  


Dean turns on the radio, wearily, as they're piling in the Impala to drive out of Texas, and is startled by the flurry of static-blurred activity that pounds out of it, metallic and incensed and all-at-once, and Sam—who has been staring into the middle distance all morning—flinches at its noise. They sit in the grey dawn for a minute, early wind rocking the car on her wheels, until someone says something coherent.  
  


Ravens amassing on the coasts of Africa. That's the first part.  
  


“For fuck's sake,” Dean says, but doesn't turn it off yet. “I didn't even know there _were_ ravens in Africa—”  
  


“Wait,” Sam says, slow. Cas looks at him in the rearview mirror; he looks exhausted, and knowing.  
  


_Reports from the East Coast are coming in from bird-watchers and ornithologists stating that sometime late last night whole flocks began to take off and fly into the sea,_ says a brittle aluminum voice.  
  


Sam closes his eyes.  
  


The radio woman rambles on in her brutal rusty voice. Paints a lurid picture of black swathes of feathers, plunging into the oceans as if hurled from slingshots or lured by something unknowable, and the tremor of fear in her voice is unmistakable.  
  


And still, still in the morning they're hurtling into the waves, more every hour, thinning in the trees, washing up on the shores. Mimicking the doves on the highways for reasons no one can explain. Theories spin and clatter like coins in a washing machine in an ever-rising morning-report cacophony until Dean has to turn it off, punches the button almost frantically, _make it stop,_ that motion seems to say, _Jesus Christ, make it stop, make it quiet._  
  
  


Sam rests his head against the window, pushes his skull against it as if trying to hide his face, and Dean searches out Cas' eyes in the rearview mirror.  
  


Neither of them speak, but Castiel nods, a slight movement to answer the creeping question. _I'm afraid so._  
  


* * *

 

  
  


Dean doesn't say where they're going; they simply go. The road rumbling by feels aimless and lost. Flat prairie stretches out as far as Castiel can see.  
  


“What do you think?” Dean asks, when they stop for gas somewhere in the middle of Oklahoma. Cas is dawdling outside the Impala while Sam sits quietly inside; he raises his head to the question and then looks somewhere else, anywhere else, at the cloud-veined sky, the warped reflections of the gas pumps on the Impala's slick metal.  
  


“It isn't evidence to the contrary,” Cas says, “if that's what you're hoping.”  
  


“Shit.”  
  


Dean drops the gas pump back into its cradle and wanders inside the station. Cas gets back into the car, shifting on the summer-sticky leather.  
  


Sam's been quiet all day, absorbed in the countryside or in staring at his own hands. He's dazed in the way of the extremely tired, eyes glassy and mouth turned down, swaying even while the Impala is still. Castiel examines his downward-cast gaze and low eyelids and asks, softly, “How did you sleep last night, Sam?”  
  


He can't stop thinking of the way Sam had sat up in the early hours, looked out for ages at what had appeared to be nothing. Sam hasn't asked about the sedatives and Cas doesn't intend to give them back to him until he's spoken to Dean about it. Maybe it was a mistake to introduce those to Sam at all. The little paper sticker on the orange bottle warns that sleepwalking is a side-effect and sleep-staring doesn't seem like a far cry from that.  
  


Sam blinks, slowly, and then gives him a soft and wary smile in the mirror.  
  


“Not too well,” he says.  
  


Cas rolls the words on his tongue before he speaks them, trying not to let them become infused with the worry hiding in his mouth. “Bad dreams?”  
  


Sam swallows hard and looks away.  
  


“Yeah,” he says.  
  


“May I ask what you're dreaming about?”  
  


Sam is quiet, watching the gas station intently for any sign of Dean coming back out, and waits until the glass door opens and Dean emerges to answer, to destroy any hope of a continuation of the conversation after he speaks. Evasion.  
  


“Growling,” he says.  
  


Cas doesn't have time to respond before Dean is back in the driver's seat and tossing plastic bags of snack food onto their laps, Planter's Peanuts and Ho-Hos, across the seat and over its back, and pulling away, leaving the subject of Sam's nightmares flat on the road behind them like a crushed animal.  
  


Growling. Cas watches Sam all the way to Waynoka, trying to puzzle that word out. Sam seems to hold that admittance just behind his teeth, trembling there, and averts his eyes from everything and everyone while the sun smudges pink against the black horizon and evening prowls overhead, pulling its spiderweb network of stars behind, above them.  
  


* * *

  
  


The fish begin to die in the Southern Hemisphere first. They float in great surges up from the sea, overwhelming fishing boats off the lower coasts of South America, of Africa, no one single species distinctly the majority but _all_ fish, all species. They wash in along with the tides and mar the coastlines like the ghastly aftermath of an oil spill. In lakes and streams they die, too, until slow-moving currents are choked with their stinking corpses and the water runs foul with their decay.  
  


It takes three days for the news to jump across the network to America, from hunters in Chile.  
  


By then the coasts are free of ravens. In the absence of their weird and eerie chatter on the beaches and boardwalks and piers and ports is the fearsome hush of the sea they hurled themselves into over days and nights. They blanketed Asia's shores and Oceania's edges for only a day and a half before they drowned themselves, startling lands in which they were not native for only hours before killing themselves in droves. It's all any news station can talk about.  
  


Men and women walk the sands in curving lines to clear the ground of the dead come in with the tide.  
  


Soon the ravens' bodies are replaced with the fish.  
  


No one understands. Everyone tries to—biologists, scientists, environmentalists, all suggest pollutants, the weather, conspiracy, hoax. But the rivers and streams clot with the dead and so much birdsong is silent, now. So much is silent except for the constant drone of the radio waves, the news cycles, the confusion, the fear. That gets louder all the time.  
  


Rains of dying doves blanket Europe. People seem to walk with their bodies hunched as if in fear of the imminent torrent of the birds.  
  


In Protection, Kansas, Dean drops a rolled-up newspaper into Castiel's hands and looks at him with a set jaw and shivering eyes, all the points of his body angled in the direction of a hope for some good news. Cas looks down at the black newsprint, the cheap paper, and knows immediately that no such news exists.  
  


* * *

  
  


The problem with hunches, Castiel thinks, is the problem of certainty. An idea takes hold like a seed in good soil and then everything that follows after seems to bow in homage to the growing blossom until the universe itself is orchestrated, in everything it does, towards the flower of the thing. There have been ravens and doves and to him those said _Flood._ Now ravens are drowning and the seas and rivers and lakes are choked with the stink and the flesh of decaying fish and he can't help but see the pattern, see the meaning; but he's wary of even saying it, of acknowledging that there might be a pattern or a meaning, because of the possibility that he might still be wrong.  
  


He looks at Sam—weary, swaying Sam—and Dean, pacing and pulling at his mouth, and wants, above all, to spare them the hunch. He can count on one hand the number of years they've lived since the attempted End but he doesn't have limbs enough to count the number of years of _potential_ they've been seeing since then.  
  


A few months ago, he remembers, Sam had said something in passing about enrolling in an online college. Taking classes at night when he can, just to keep himself sharp and learning. And Cas remembers how _good_ that had made him feel, hearing that, hearing a future on Sam's mouth.  
  


And for two years now, Cas thinks—acutely aware of it in, a way he doesn't easily let himself admit—for two years now he has seen a shift in the way Dean looks at him. A tilt away from trench-warfare brotherhood and into something else. Something future-tense that sits on Dean's eyelids in the same way that Sam's little hope had sat on his lips. It's not something they talk about. They don't talk about things like that, as a rule. But Dean looks at him now as if he can imagine the next week, the next month, the next year, with Cas embroidered into all of them, and as if he takes a deep comfort in that.  
  


Cas wants Sam to find his way back to school. He wants Sam to smile and read books late at night and see something beyond the place they are now. He wants Dean to keep imagining them all picked out together in brilliant threads on the canvas of the sky.  
  


He doesn't want to tell them that the Great Flood wiped out every living thing the first time it came and that the killing took it _all_ —it took the birds that flew above the water and the animals that swam within it and it spared nothing except the things and the people that had been chosen to be spared. Enough flying things, enough ravens and doves to bring news of dry land and little else. He doesn't want to tell them that something is smudging out the optimism that those ravens and doves once represented. The ravens who sought land are drowning themselves in the sea and the doves who brought olive branches to Noah once are breaking their beaks and their heads on the Earth. The water is teeming with the death of the things that are meant to thrive in it.  
  


He doesn't want to tell them what he thinks it means, now, all together in the garden of the idea—that if the Flood is coming, this time, it isn't meant to be survived. He'd give anything not to have to tell them that.  
  


Their eyes are heavy with questions, and it's very hot outside, and the newsprint of the report on the dying fish is smudging off on his fingers like charcoal, and it smells like charcoal too, fire and ink, so he tells them in as many words as he can muster and he tries to separate the idea from himself, to remove it from his own hearing and his own tongue because he can't stand the way their faces are falling, the confusion and anxiety and fear. In the end he can't even remember what it is that he says. But he arrives back into the conversation from the far place of self-removal in time to hear, “It's coming, I know it, I'm sorry,” he's so sorry. That's all there is.  
  


Sam's shoulders come down and his lips come apart, just a little, as he looks to Dean as if for help, or reassurance. Waiting for the neatness of the grand plan as to how they will against all odds beat back the new looming black apocalypse, his face the picture of little-boy trust, and Cas thinks Sam must have been looking at Dean like that his whole life, with complete certainty that Dean can do anything, Dean can save anyone, Dean will always, _always_ know what to do.  
  


Dean, for his part, looks at Cas. Avoids confronting that look on Sam's face. His body settles under the weight of what they know, and Cas wants him to get angry about it, stand up and kick something, hurl a curse word or at least mutter a despondent “Jesus Christ” into the palms of his hands. Anything but resignation. He holds Dean's gaze, trying to keep it strong, trying to ignore the instability of Sam's figure and its shudder in the golden closed-curtain-light. It's an indescribable punch in the gut to see Dean's eyelids close, his face pull in, his head bow down.  
  


_Oh God,_ Sam's body seems to say, in its chair, the way Cas can see his chest fall concave and tremble, _oh God, he doesn't know what to do. It's coming, oh God. And he doesn't know what to do._  
  
  


“I'm sorry,” Castiel says again. Sam turns his face to the window, swallowing air.  
  


Dean puts his head in his hands, not despairing, not yet, but disappointed, somehow. Disappointed, and very, very tired, bone-weary against the bluntness, the sour fear, _goddammit,_ his body says, in low response to the language of Sam's shoulders, _goddammit, and we had all this time. Just yesterday we had years ahead of us. I know we did. I held them in my hands._  
  
  


Castiel doesn't know what his own body is saying, and doesn't care.  
  


He tries to joke. “Time to build that ark,” he says, and hates himself immediately for it.  
  


* * *

  
  


_He's standing in a valley. A collection of valleys, in the wet rivuleted narrows between towering hills thick with scrub and brush, alone. No idea where this is, only acutely aware of the distance of the ocean. Middle lands._   
  
  


_Why is he always so alone in these places? A single solitary black point beneath the dome of the universe, a veritable speck of sand, or a fruit fly, with alone-ness fitting its fingers into the spaces between his ribs and squeezing. His heart, his lungs, his stomach could pop like water balloons. He picks a direction and walks. He wishes Dean were here, or Cas, to take his hand and lead him somewhere that has a name, a latitude, a longitude. Something beastly seems to be growling in his forearms, in his bones._   
  
  


_The growling leaves his fingertips and they spark with lightning. He lifts them up to his face. Thunder overhead. He looks up; his hair is wet._   
  
  


_From a great distance, he hears his name. There is higher ground to his right; he climbs it, needing it, scrabbling on rocks, breaking his fingernails to pieces on stone. His keratin comes apart in little white bits and tumbles down the hillside behind him, loud, like shards of porcelain shattering. He looks up; his hair is wet and the sky is taut and blue and embryonic, stretched and veined like the wings of an insect, slick clouds and the growling. He is at the top of the hill and the pressure is relinquishing his body. Down and down in the valley he just climbed up from are two figures and their eyes are brilliant star-points in their heads—two forest-green, two opal-blue. Dean and Castiel. Holding shadow-hands—not in intimacy but in fear—while the growling sky shimmers and undulates. Castiel lifts his hand and holds it out to him at his great distance. He looks up; lightning spurts and dances down his face like rain. Two voices call his name. The skin of the sky rips apart and there is a vast and cacophonous roaring and_ he bursts awake like the breaking of a wave.  
  


Kansas, still. When the blood stops rushing to Sam's ears and drains away, the nighttime sounds settle in, like a warm blanket over his head—traffic outside; Dean snoring in the next bed. A soft brush of breath on his wrist, a mop of dark hair on the pillow at his right. Now he remembers—it was his turn to share with Cas.  
  


His sudden movements must have stirred Cas because he feels a few cool fingertips on the back of his hand and glances down. Dim blue eyes look back up—not glowing, not sparking, just human, just normal.  
  


“Nightmare?” Cas whispers.  
  


Sam doesn't answer. He twists sideways, sits up, slings his legs over the side of the bed. The red numbers on the motel alarm clock are just turning over into four AM.  
  


The mattress shifts and dips as Cas sits up, too, and Sam can feel his eyes on the back of his neck. He shivers in night-cold; there's a strange kind of motion-sickness waking up in his arms, as if something inside him is sloshing back and forth like water in a bathtub. A rocking.  
  


“What are you dreaming about, Sam?” Cas asks, gently.  
  


He doesn't want to say. He gets up and goes into the bathroom and shuts the door.  
  


Castiel sighs, leans against the headboard. It digs into the knob of his spine. The bathroom light paints a thin streak of yellow on the carpet. He wishes he still had the power in his hand to touch two fingers to Sam's forehead and glimpse his dreams, and maybe still them for a while; the traffic on the street outside sounds a little too much like the hush and pull of the ocean and he feels extraordinarily useless in the face of everything.  
  


Dean still hasn't told them where they're going. He's snoring now, unaware of his brother's bad dreams, but he spent the evening on his phone, trying to fumble the right words together to explain what they know to anyone who will listen and believe. From what Cas can gather, he did have some luck. His face grew grimmer with every completed call but he soldiered on, eventually settling into a rhythm with whoever was on the other end, and though his mouth stumbled around the word _flood_ every time, he always managed to say it. “Maybe people will listen _,_ ”he'd said when he was done. “Maybe—” But that was where his hope ended. He'd pressed his fingers into his eyes and told Sam and Cas to get some shut-eye.  
  


Dean is stretched out on his bed, now, face in his pillow, and Cas allows himself a moment of quiet to look at the terrain of him. He's always thought of Dean as _safe—_ broad and strong and deliberate. He hopes that lasts through this, through the impending end; he has a feeling both he and Sam are going to need it. And he's grateful for it, too—grateful that at least one of them is looking past the looming presence of the flood on their horizon and trying to dig some optimism out of it. Dean hasn't said it, but everything about him, the way he moves and speaks and looks at them, seems to imply that he fully intends to fight his way through this tooth and nail and come out of it breathing.  
  


Castiel has always loved that in him, he realises, abruptly and without ceremony. Dean's tireless and stubborn desire to persevere.  
  


He loves it.  
  


It's a heavy realisation for four in the morning and so Cas lies down again, closing his eyes against the streak of yellow light from the bathroom, hoping Sam comes back to bed soon and manages to sleep.  
  


From the general direction of the Impala's hood on the road, he thinks Dean is moving them inland.  
  


* * *

  
  


The radio and television keep talking about the birds, about the fish. About the droughts that are blooming like fungus on the map, in coastal areas, in wetlands. What they don't talk about is the theory. It doesn't make it into glass-walled rooms or the lips of men and women behind their news desks or microphones. It creeps through neighbourhoods and back alleys like a gathering of rats, a cluster of whispers.  
  


The network is subtle; Dean counts on that. When he calls the dusty names in his contact list to pitch the Flood hypothesis to them he gets murmurs of assent and agreement, promises to pass the word along. Questions like _any idea of what to do? Who to talk to, what to put down?_ Those are the questions he can't answer, blunts with responses like _gotta go_ or _another call coming in_ and then he shuts his phone with a stab of guilt.  
  


It's hard to tell a people who are raised on killing that there's nothing left for them to kill.  
  


But they listen, and they talk.  
  


They call their children at college or upstate, plant the notion in the heads of their kindergarteners, who whisper to their classmates until the concept floats into their teacher's ears and the teacher tells the child's story to the others at the front desk and tries her hardest not to show the way it's wormed into her brain and is beginning, horribly, to make sense to the part of her that grew up Methodist and knows that old story. They tell their gullible neighbours, the impressionable receptionists at motels, junkies and winos and the homeless, the people who will believe and gossip and maybe spread a little bit of belief beneath underpasses and over train lines, trading the story for cigarettes over fire barrels until it scurries, like a spider across the concrete web, into all the nooks and crannies of the metropolis. They call numbers they don't know to say cryptic things about Great Floods and the End Times to people they've never met in hopes that the anonymous prophecy will make these people anxious enough to stop, think, prepare. Stock their pantries, kiss their wives.  
  


While the air waves fill with confusion and say nothing of floods, three days after his marathon phone-call in Protection, Dean hears a man in a gas station in Nebraska whispering to an old woman buying liquor about leading Biblical scholars and Genesis interpretations and smiles grimly to himself. That's how it goes.  
  


Maybe, Dean thinks, maybe the man will buy a boat and drive out to the Great Lakes with his wife and his dog, call it a vacation, watch the sky for divine storms and wait to be lifted above the wreckage. Maybe. That's what he can hope for.  
  


Sam isn't sleeping well, though, and Cas is being quiet and thoughtful in the way that makes Dean want to simultaneously shake him out of it and leave him very well alone. Furthermore, Dean has no idea where they're going. Within a week, hopefully, if word spreads out from the hunting network into civilian suburbia and enough people begin to see the sense in ravens and doves and fish and drought, or at least continue to spread the word to people who might believe, the middle parts of the country will begin to clear out—people will dash for the coasts, purchase boats or build them, go to their families, prepare to weather the storm for however long it lasts, none of them quite believing that it'll happen but obeying the instinct in their gut that whispers _just in case._ For his part, he wants to avoid the water for as long as he can—the Midwest seems safest. He doesn't know _where_ in the Midwest is best, so they're driving, aimless, slow, until something happens or stops them.  
  


When he asks Cas for a rough estimate as to when the Flood might come—treating it now as a certainty, because he isn't secure enough in the alternative anymore to entertain it—he watches Cas turn numbers over in his head, calculate how long it's been since the first omen appeared, and swallows the information when Cas replies, “Forty days from the beginning is a safe bet. I'd guess that we have just under a month.”  
  


Twenty-four days, to be exact.  
  


Dean doesn't want to think about how small that number actually is, and how big the end of that period of time is going to be. Twenty-four days to either come up with a plan of action and execute it, or find the safest possible place and hole up to wait it out. Since Cas seems convinced that there's nothing to be done, and Sam seems to be folding inward on himself and stares out the window and at his hands more than he looks at either of them and rarely speaks, the latter seems the best. The latter seems absolute. The only question is _where_.  
  


The radio chatters on in its hungry metallic voices. Beginning now to talk about the distinct lack of tropical storms this summer. About the drying-up of lakes and ponds and the slowing, the thinning of rivers. About the lowest point on the Mississippi. The makeshift dams of dead fish choking the narrowest bands of creeks and streams. The worrying absence of any ravens, anywhere, at all.  
  


It clatters and buzzes about what everyone already knows, but not the most important thing. With twenty-two days left, Sam and Dean and Castiel are doubling back through Nebraska towards Colorado when they hit a solid ten miles of backed-up traffic leaving Lincoln in every direction and Dean knows the message, somehow, has hit home.  
  


Sam looks pained to see the beeping, sprawling, panicking mess of trucks and SUVs and camping trailers, crawling like multicoloured beetles and gleaming in arcs of white light under heavy rainless clouds. The mass of them stinks of gasoline and hot rubber, and overhead ring the distant wails of horns and police sirens.  
  


Dean pulls them off the road, across a grassy ditch onto a frontage road that is almost empty, to take them somewhere quiet and rural instead of fighting the highways, and Sam glimpses, for a moment, a tinted car window splashed with cheap streaked paint, across the two back panels in broken capitals:  
  


_THE WRATH OF GOD HAS COME_   
  
  


_UPON US AGAIN_   
  
  


* * *

  
  


The story breaks the airwaves by the time they get to where they're going: Hyannis, Nebraska, easily the smallest excuse for a town any of them have ever seen.  
  


The roads are empty. The sound of the Impala's radio pumping out of Dean's rolled-down window seems to fill up Morton Street all on its own. One of the local pastors in these parts, he seems to recall, is a hunter, and must have picked up the word somewhere in these lonely stretches of land, passed it to the people of this place.  
  


The sound of the local station is fuzzy with static, but enough steely words come through to string together. The man speaking into the mic is being careful to keep cheerful skepticism in his voice while he talks about it—the recent widespread Doomsday, or should he say _Genesis,_ theory that is beginning to take hold of small towns and communities and indeed, from what he hears, several other places in the world—but surely, he says, surely it's nothing, nothing at all, and here's Daniel with the weather, and it's a Sunday morning, and Sam caught a glimpse of a Seventh Day Adventist church as they pulled into town, but the doors were chained shut, and no one milled about on the sidewalk or the parking lot.  
  


It's foggy and the day is dark and the best label Sam can think of to put to Hyannis so far is _ghost town._  
  
  


“Think they all got the message?” Dean asks, rolling up his window, creeping through the street at twenty miles an hour. “Up and left?”  
  


“A little place like this,” Castiel says, “I'm sure they took up their children and sought higher ground as soon as they heard.” Despite himself, he's shrinking in the back seat, clutching reflexively at the leather. He can feel the emptiness in this town in his bones.  
  


“Which seems like the smart thing to do,” Sam says, abruptly, from the passenger side. He hasn't spoken all morning, but now he turns his face to Dean, questioning. “So why are we here instead of following their lead?”  
  


Dean shrugs. Avoids his brother's eyes. “Middle of the middle of nowhere,” he says, craning his neck to look at Hyannis passing, squinting a little in the bleary glaring sun when it deigns to peek out from behind the clouds. “Probably last a little longer, you know. Further away from the ocean.”  
  


Cas can only see a slash of Dean's face in the rear-view mirror. His green eyes are carefully blank. He knows as well as they do that a place like this might last a little longer than the coasts and islands, but it won't last forever; and that says something about defeat that none of them want to acknowledge. Sam exhales and doesn't press the question further.  
  


Twenty-one days, give or take, by Cas' reckoning, until the seas rise and overwhelm the world, and here they are in the Middle of the Middle of Nowhere, on flat tracts of land in a place thoroughly hollow. Not even a stray dog exists to put life onto the streets.  
  


Dean drives all the way through Hyannis—it doesn't take long—and then turns around, goes back through again. He only has a vague idea of what he wants them to do here, and it involves finding the tallest building and bunking up in it to wait for the water, and past that he isn't sure. There was a motel back down the highway that looked just as desolate as the town itself—no cars on the asphalt, _Sorry, We're Closed!_ in the window of the lobby door. But it'll have beds, and Internet access, and he knows Sam and Cas are both as restless as he is. The sight of all those people fleeing Lincoln yesterday put a stirring in them, a fear. They could all use some solid ground beneath their feet while it lasts.  
  


* * *

  
  


The motel hasn't been abandoned for long. When they cut the chains on the door and step inside, there's hardly dust on the check-in counter, but it's dark, and when Dean experimentally opens the register under the counter, next to a spinning rack of postcards, it's empty.  
  


Cas lingers in the open doorway while the boys search for room keys. Across the highway there is nothing but land, someone's ranch, maybe, and blacktop devoid of cars. The Impala almost looks out of place, gleaming darkly in the parking lot, as if she's some alien craft descended in the midst of the desolation. For a moment he imagines the tall brown weeds laid out in front of him waving like sea-grass under miles of water, imagines the pressure that will bear down on this motel and that town and wash it all away, and shudders, though the day is warm.  
  


“Cas.” Dean's hand on his shoulder makes him jump. “Come on.”  
  


* * *

  
  


They go into town in search of food that evening. There's only one grocery store to speak of and it, too, is chained up and coldly left behind, standing forlorn on the street with black windows and the weight of the sky pushing down on it.  
  


They break in with a terrible sort of casualty that serves only to remind Dean that no one is ever going to come back to this place, and no one will ever be angry about their store being robbed, and no one will ever miss the food they're going to take. He shoulders his way inside through the stubborn front doors, flashlight in his hand.  
  


There's nothing so eerie as an empty grocery store, at least in Dean's mind. And he's seen plenty of _eerie_ in his time. There should be people in here, mothers with strollers, kids playing with the bouncy balls that occupy those giant wire cages mid-aisle, men bashfully picking up tampons for their wives, teenagers piling plastic baskets full of ramen and Coke. The high fluorescents should be on, the bakery in the back of the store smelling like yeast and chocolate, and someone in Frozen Foods stocking TV dinners, but instead there is a cold kind of darkness—long unoccupied aisles—a toppled pile of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom cans scattered like shrapnel across the linoleum. It's the set-up to every bad situation in every bad zombie horror film ever made, except that not a single thing stirs anywhere, and their footsteps echo obscenely against the tall piped roof.  
  


“I'll go find bottled water,” Sam says, his voice terribly loud. Dean nods, and Sam clicks on his flashlight, turns from him and from Cas and begins to wander away.  
  


Cas grabs up a plastic basket from a nearby stack and Dean almost laughs at how absurd this looks. Going shopping, basket and all, in a pitch-black grocery store in an abandoned town in the middle of Nebraska, a few weeks out from the end of the world, and Cas looks like a bemused out-of-towner who just wants to find a box of pasta, and Dean wishes quite suddenly that it were that simple—that they'd all had the chance to sit down and _need_ things like boxes of pasta, or pancake mix, or Spaghettios, things you could keep in a pantry, things that meant you were settled and safe. He wishes they'd been able to get that far, to the golden place where they could have beds of their own and a mailing address and they could go to grocery stores on Saturdays and Sam could buy his organic tomatoes and Dean could buy whole gallons of milk and Cas could bring home spices they'd never heard of from places like Morocco and India, where they could be real people instead of hunters. A life they _deserved,_ in Dean's mind, a place they were always moving towards, the simplest reward for all the loss and grief they've sustained. Unattainable now. Broken to little bits by God or angels or whoever flips those divine switches up there these days. It's not fair.  
  


A few cans of something non-perishable thunk dully together in Castiel's ridiculous red plastic basket and Dean blinks, sobered. In the dim glow of his Maglite Cas looks at him, brow furrowed.  
  


“Are you alright?”  
  


Dean swallows, reaches up to grab a can of something called Fruit Medley. “Yeah.”  
  


Cas wanders a little ways down the aisle, out of the grasp of Dean's flashlight, the basket tucked into the crook of his elbow like he's a goddamn fifties' housewife.  
  


“No, you're not.”  
  


“Well, would you be?” Dean catches up with him, searching the shelves for peanut butter or Chicken Noodle Soup. Something quick and easy and comforting.  
  


“I'm not alright, either,” Cas says, with a surprising calmness.  
  


Dean glances at him—he's mostly shadow, this far away from the windows at the storefront. Darkness filling up the wrinkles at the corners of Castiel's eyes and the gentle set of his mouth. Pushing, to swallow him. Dean doesn't want to think of Cas being swallowed up by anything so he turns his flashlight into the shelves where it gleams on aluminum and paper labels instead.  
  


“What are we doing here?” Cas asks, turning to the opposite side of the aisle. Dean turns the light with him.  
  


“Getting food.”  
  


“In Hyannis.”  
  


There's the peanut butter. Dean puts two jars in Castiel's basket.  
  


“We're going to find the tallest building,” Dean says, without looking at him, “and we're going to hole up in it until this thing happens.”  
  


He can feel Cas looking at him with those stupid soul-probing eyes and it feels like ants crawling under his skin.  
  


“And what good is that going to do?”  
  


Maybe they should get some more soup. Sammy likes soup, always has, it used to be the easiest way to get him to go to bed as a kid—warm broth and a glass of milk.  
  


“Might give us a shot.”  
  


They might need another basket, come to think of it.  
  


He hears Cas let out a heavy breath. “Dean.”  
  


“What?” He turns down the aisle, back the way they came, trying to think of where Saltines would be, what's taking Sam so long to find the bottled water. Cas follows after, his boots sticky on the tacky floor.  
  


“It's not going to give us a shot at anything.”  
  


Dean sets his jaw.  
  


“I—admire your determination to survive, Dean, I always have, but this time—”  
  


“What?” Dean shoots him a look that probably misses its mark in the darkness and scoops two boxes of Saltines into Cas' basket. “You don't think we can do it?”  
  


“Frankly,” Cas says, “no.”  
  


“Yeah, well. You were always kind of a cynic, even when you had wings.” Pretzels. The thin ones, like sticks, that you could build little towers out of. Sam likes those, too.  
  


“Dean—”  
  


“Look.” Dean braces one arm against the shelf and turns the flashlight into Castiel's chest, lighting up a crescent of his mouth, open in concern. “This is the best plan I have, okay? Sam's acting weird, and I'm worried about him, and I don't want to hop all over the damn country chasing leads where there aren't any on how to stop this thing. I want to be smart about this. So we are gonna buy some damn pretzel sticks, and we are gonna find the highest ground in this podunk piece of nowhere, and we are gonna ride this thing out. You hear me?”  
  


In the light Cas' mouth turns down in something like sadness that Dean doesn't want to think about.  
  


“Don't say anything,” Dean says, crushing the bag of pretzels into the basket.  
  


“Dean.”  
  


“I have to believe that we can make it out of this,” he says, abruptly. “I just—Cas—”  
  


Cas is quiet, attentive. Footsteps from a ways away; Sam.  
  


“I can't lay down and do nothing. Not when you and Sammy are at stake. I can't. And—apparently there's nothing to _be_ done so I've—I've got to find something. And right now this is that something.”  
  


He gestures helplessly to the red basket in Cas' arms. The gleam of Cas' eyes flickers downward in the shadows.  
  


“I don't want to lie down and die,” he says, and hopes that finishes it, and Sam comes into the aisle with an armful of bottled water strapped together in plastic sheeting.  
  


Cas holds Dean's eyes for a long moment until some kind of understanding passes between them, and then they move on.  
  


Bread for the peanut butter. Apples for Sam. A box of Little Debbie cakes for Castiel's sweet tooth. Everything Dean takes off the shelves makes him think of the word _comfort,_ and he thinks that they all need that almost as much as they need to keep from starving.

* * *

 

Honestly, it was an afterthought—the box of pills Sam had snatched for himself from the darkened pharmacy in that grocery store. The same long unpronounceable name black-lettered onto the box's front as the pills Cas had given him and then—thinking Sam wouldn't notice—taken away again. Sleeping pills, mild ones.  
  


He hasn't been dreaming as _much_ since they started the trek up here to Nebraska, but when he has been dreaming, it's been bad. Riddle-dreams, the infuriating kind that seem to be saying something just under the surface that he can never get his fingers into, and that he never fully remembers in the morning: only bits and pieces, storm-clouds, cliffsides, the sound of his name. Lightning sometimes. The strange vertigo rocking in his forearms hasn't gone away—it's as if someone has hollowed out his muscles and bones and filled him up with water, and it's moving back and forth as he walks and talks and breathes, down into his fingers and up into his elbows. He'd call it an itch if it were possible to scratch it, but he can't, and it's subtle enough sometimes that he has to wonder if it's even there at all.  
  


He's never been a fan of prescription anything. But they'd helped him sleep, through most of the night, anyway, and dulled his dreams down to fragments.  
  


Hyannis feels like a place that people don't come to. In that way they are intruders and it puts a bad taste in his mouth, knowing, terrible as it is, that they won't ever leave, either. Not unless they're borne away on the water.  
  


The rocking in his arms is awful by the time they get back to the motel—it seems to get worse at night—and he thinks, _if the smallest comfort I can have in this place is a good night's sleep, I'm going to take it._  
  
  


Dean wanders off into the buzzing summer evening to see if the lobby has a microwave or a coffeepot. It's past dusk, and Sam is fairly sure Cas is engaged in a snowy TV news cycle talking about—what else?—the _message_ , and so he slips into the bathroom to wash one pill, just one, down with a cupped handful of tap water.  
  


He doesn't hear Cas coming into the doorway and doesn't see him, either, until he looks up in the mirror.  
  


Cas looks at him, silent, and then looks down at the open bottle. “Margot Etheridge,” he says. The name on the label.  
  


He looks back up to Sam's reflection, and Sam knows his face is a little guilty.  
  


“I'm sorry I gave you those in the first place,” Castiel says, rueful. “I shouldn't have.”  
  


“Why not?” Sam caps the bottle and holds it tightly in his hand, as if Cas is going to snatch it from him, as if he's doing something wrong.  
  


Cas blinks at him. “You took too many, that one day. You slept all the way through the afternoon.”  
  


Sam swallows. “Yeah.”  
  


“Dean's worried about you. The way you've been feeling.” He pauses. "He knows you've been dreaming."  
  


“Yeah.”  
  


“I saw you,” Cas says then, gently. “You nearly sleepwalked. You sat bolt upright but you weren't awake and you stared out the window for ages.”  
  


“I don't remember that,” Sam says, suddenly a little afraid of the bottle in his hands. Oh. Maybe that was why Cas took them away.  
  


Castiel's mouth turns down at the corners—not in disappointment but in concern, and he gently reaches out to take the bottle from Sam, and Sam lets him. He isn't sure why. It sort of removes itself from his fingers, like a ghost passing through a wall.  
  


“Do they help?” Cas says, looking down at it.  
  


“They did,” Sam says, “for a little bit.” He fidgets, uncomfortable. “I shouldn't have done that. Taking too many that one day. That was—I won't do that anymore.” He looks at the floor, the neat consistency of linoleum tile, brownish faux grout.  
  


“You're trying not to dream.”  
  


Castiel says it clinically, like a doctor repeating a detail back to his patient, non-accusatory. Sam gnaws at his lower lip, feels the skin break a little. A little divot of salt.  
  


“On the radio,” Cas says, “a few days ago, when they talked about the ravens diving into the sea. You knew.”  
  


“I didn't know.” Sam can feel something hot and liquid stirring in his stomach, a kind of foreboding. He knows what Cas is implying and it rides on the backs of words like _freak_ and _psychic_ and things he never wants to hear about himself ever again. But he says it anyway: “I—I just kind of _felt._ ”  
  


Cas puts the bottle down on the sink, gingerly.  
  


“You don't have to tell me if you don't want to.” In the space where the bottle had been in their hands Cas fills the void with his own, touches Sam's fingertips feather-light. It's cool and friendly and calm and Sam is inordinately grateful for it. “But are you dreaming about it?”  
  


He nods; that's all he's capable of doing. The Flood. Or—perhaps not the event itself but the moments leading up to it, the sudden surge of an ocean, the sudden wreckage of the clouds, lightning in his fingers.  
  


“Does that mean something?” he says, barely a whisper, hoping for a _no._  
  
  


Castiel pulls his hand away. “I don't know. I don't think so.”  
  


At least that's something.  
  


They stand there in strange silence for a moment longer, Sam's hand still dripping water onto the floor.  
  


“If you can,” Cas says, finally, resting his fingertips on the bottle, “don't take these. That was my mistake.”  
  


“I just want to be able to sleep,” Sam says. He cringes, a little, at how quietly desperate he sounds. “Without being—”  
  


“Scared?”  
  


“You're way too good at reading people, man,” Sam says, trying to laugh, lighten things. “It's kind of creepy.”  
  


Cas smiles and the concern melts a little from his face.  
  


“If I can help,” he says, “just ask. Please.” Then he does something strange, something Sam's only ever seen him do to Dean in instants of tipsy affection at roadside dives, or when Dean is asleep, and Castiel thinks Sam is asleep, too, and not watching—he touches Sam's face, cups his cheek very gently for just a moment, the way a mother would cradle the cheek of her child, cool calm friendly touch, and then he's moving back into the motel room to endure the rest of the news report, and the conversation is over.  
  


Sam stands there, feeling oddly comforted, until he remembers himself. He dries his hand off and then pauses for only a moment before he takes up the bottle of pills and sets it quietly at the bottom of the trash can beneath the sink.  
  


Whether the dreams, the feeling in his arms, mean something or not, better to face it than to numb it. At this point, staring into the abyss at the end of twenty-one days, the idea of _not feeling_ things, good or bad, seems almost blasphemous.  
  


Dean comes back to the room balancing cheap coffee mugs full of hot soup in the crooks of his arms, and they all sit on the edge of the bed, watching cameras on the television pan across highways choked with traffic, overcrowded marinas and boardwalks, women with missing teeth talking about the End of Days over the white corners of the posters they hold in their hands: Genesis verses painted in red letters. It's a little surreal, Sam thinks, to see the tiny little message Dean had sent out so carefully over the phone lines to other people like them, now making its way in scrolling text across the bottom of the screen, attributed to _leading Biblical scholars_ and obscure churches they've never even heard of, who all seem to think they'd had the idea first. Everything, of course, laced with healthy skepticism. The hunting network hasn't failed them. The life and times of a rumour, working its magic on the minds of the people, spreading like plague, and Sam hopes that it'll do at least some of these people some good.  
  


If they can save even one life—however unlikely Castiel seems to think that is—it will have been worth it.  
  


After a dinner of too-hot soup and a few reruns of _Everybody Loves Raymond_ they settle down to sleep, and as Cas curls up under the blankets next to him Sam can't help but picture a clock in his head, winding down to the dawn of the twentieth day before the end of the world. When he wakes, shivering, from another nightmare of torrential winds and mountains crumbling, a few hours into the morning of that twentieth day, Cas wakes up, too, and doesn't say anything. He holds Sam's wrist in his cool hand, thumb stroking gently over the edges of his bones, until Sam's heart stops racing, and he manages to close his eyes again.  
  


* * *

  
  


The tallest building in Hyannis isn't hard to find. It's the firehouse, set into one of the curving roads that leads out of town, a red-brick building pushing up against the granite-coloured sky. From the top, Dean thinks, you could probably see for miles out over the flat land.  
  


The door to the left of the closed garages is padlocked shut, but Sam picks it open in a minute and a half. It swings open with a rusty groan to show a dark concrete floor, windows slatted closed with blinds and locks. The two fire trucks are hulking presences to their right, tucked away in the shadows like slumbering beasts. The glow of Dean's Maglite glimmers over hubcaps and smooth red paneling.  
  


Somewhere on a wall Cas finds a light switch and with the thick grumbling hum of a generator sluggishly waking up, the fluorescent tubes in the ceiling light up, buzzing like insects. There's a littering of dead crickets along the bottom of the garage doors, a quiet red alarm hung on the brick wall over a few sturdy wooden desks. Open files scattered on the floor, yellow carbon paper on the oil-stained floor like so many cartoon banana peels, and a little ways out of the back corner of the garage floor is a fireman's pole disappearing up into a circle of dim light.  
  


The bigness, the sturdiness of the place is nice. Dean wanders toward the fireman's pole while Cas, out of some misplaced sense of duty to cleanliness, scoops up armfuls of the discarded files and stacks them on the desk. Sam follows after Dean, craning his long neck upward to look through the hole in the ceiling.  
  


“There should be beds up there,” Dean says, gripping the pole as if to test its steadiness. “And showers and a kitchen.”  
  


It's an awfully nice firehouse for a place as tiny as Hyannis, but he's not complaining and has no desire to question it. A moment later Sam spots the stairs up to the second floor that sits atop the garages and closed-off offices like a flat cap. Dean touches Castiel's wrist as they pass by, and he leaves off sorting the carbon paper back into its manila to follow them up the steps.  
  


A few of the lights in the firehouse dormitory are blown out, but most flicker, whining, to life, when provoked. There are four or five twin beds laid out neatly against one wall, two grimy yellowed windows letting in bleak sunlight, a counter and sink across from the beds and a two-burner stovetop beside it. Another small room off to one side of the stairs holds three shower stalls and one toilet, and kitty-corner to it is one more room—by all appearances empty.  
  


“How's this, huh?” Dean says, feeling quietly triumphant. He couldn't have devised a more perfect place to ride out a storm—squat enough to be sturdy, high enough to weather waves, at least for a while, comfortable and safe. Thousands of miles away from any ocean. Who needs an ark when you've got a place like this? “We can sleep up here, nice and dry.”  
  


Cas, who has been trying his hardest not to look hopeful all day, gives him an acknowledging tilt of the shoulders, a small smile. “It's a good place,” he says.  
  


“Sammy?” Dean says, swiveling to get his brother's opinion on the matter, but Sam has wandered away from them—into the empty room. Dean can see the edge of his back and legs just inside the door.  
  


He's standing in the middle of the room, which isn't technically empty after all; there's a discarded mattress on the floor in one corner, but Sam isn't looking at it. He's staring up at the flat concrete ceiling, and a square of white clouds in the middle of it. A skylight.  
  


Dean almost asks what he's doing, but the look on Sam's face stops him. He looks as if he's peering over into the other side of something, as if something very strange and important is occupying the skylight's square. Dean looks more closely—it's built deeply into the roof, but it can be opened; there's a latch at its metal-welded base.  
  


He thinks of Sam's restless sleeping and his little pills. He doesn't even know if Sam is taking those anymore. Sam looks almost like he's dreaming now, looking up into the sky, the kind of blank meaningless gaze that sleepwalkers wear—flat hazel eyes like coins in his head, alien, reflecting the cottony-grey stratosphere. Uneasy.  
  


Dean clears his throat.  
  


“I'll sleep in here,” Sam says, abruptly coming back into himself. He looks at Dean, and his eyes are deep and earthen and human again.  
  


Dean furrows his face. “Why? There's plenty of beds in here.”  
  


Sam shrugs. “I like the skylight.” He moves back into the bigger room, brushing shoulders with Dean, and Dean swivels to watch him, feeling tight in his chest.  
  


Something about that idea bothers him deeply. Sam sleeping behind a wall where Dean can't get to him, where all kinds of dream-things could come to crouch around his bed and poke their fingers into his head.  
  


But in twenty days the world will have ended and it breaks something in Dean's heart, a little, to think of denying Sam something as simple as a skylight through which to see the stars at night before they're washed away. Helpless, he puts his flashlight down on the bed nearest the dividing wall to claim it as his own. The least he can do.  
  


* * *

  
  


Evening descends, thick and grey.  
  


Cas sits by the yellowed window on the firehouse's second floor, chin in his hand, watching it roll in over the empty streets, the low brick buildings and dilapidated houses. Somewhere very far away on the flat plains a radio tower light is blinking, redder and redder as the sky gets deeper. Like the pulse of a lighthouse.  
  


In here the lights are fluorescent and whitish, and one of them flickers. Sam is in the next room, where he dragged a dormitory bedstead for the water-stained mattress that was previously its only occupant, and Cas can hear him wrestling the mattress up onto it. The creak of springs.  
  


Dean wandered down to the broken-in grocery store to find a six-pack of beer a half an hour ago and part of why Castiel is sitting at the window is to watch for his figure against the asphalt, coming back. Hyannis is completely deserted and here they are safer than probably anywhere else, but something nags at him. A fear that Dean will walk off into the nighttime and never come back, swallowed up by the desolation and the dark. It's foolish. But he watches.  
  


“Do you need help, Sam?” he says, vacantly, eyeing the intersection diagonal from the firehouse. No one is here to turn on the street lights and the sun is setting fast and he feels, outlined in his yellow window box, like a beacon in the swelling night.  
  


He hears Sam grunt, and a heavy groan of rusted iron springs. “No. Thanks,” he calls.  
  


Cas pulls his attention away from the window for just a minute, to glance towards the dark hole of the doorway. He knows Dean is bothered by Sam separating himself from them, worried about the thick wall and the bare floor and things like dreams, and he has to admit he's bothered, too. At least in the motel they were near enough to him to be anchors if nightmares hit, across a carpet aisle or the space between pillows, but neither of them can reach through solid walls. Cas thinks that, irrationally, both he and Dean are just as afraid of Sam's nightmares as Sam is. What they mean, or don't mean, and the way they follow at Sam's heels in daylight and cast him in strange lights.  
  


There's a metallic rattle from downstairs in the firehouse garage and Cas turns his head back to the window—a faint splash of light is cast out on the street from within, illuminating the gleaming edges of the Impala just inside the complex's fence. Dean is back. He missed him coming out of the dark.  
  


Dean calls to him from down below, an echo up the concrete stairs, to help him close the garage door, and Cas gets up. As he's passing Sam's skylight room he pauses in the doorway—Sam is unfolding big scratchy blankets that they found in a closet downstairs along the mattress, smoothing them out with meticulous hands as if he intends to stay a long time. The light from the next room is yellow and the moon in the skylight is pallid and white and they clash in shadows on Sam's face, hollowing his cheekbones. Belatedly Cas realises there are no lamps in the ceiling in this room.  
  


“Going to sleep already?” Cas asks, and Sam looks up.  
  


“Yeah,” he says, shoulder shifting under the opening in the ceiling, the glass square framing the sky and the stars and the moon. “Yeah. I'm pretty beat.”  
  


The doorframe is rough under Castiel's hand. “Goodnight, then.”  
  


“Yeah. Goodnight.”  
  


Cas moves sideways, down into the stairwell and the dimness of it. He doesn't like that room. He hopes a simple wish _goodnight_ will be enough to stave off dreams inside it, in the secret spellwork way of words. He has begun absently to keep a list of things in his mind that they all _deserve,_ in the days before the end of the world. Security, and company, and long nights of sleep uninterrupted, all bundled up in _goodnight_ and laid at the threshold of the skylight room.  
  


Dean is downstairs with his six-pack of beer and only three lights on, and he's leaning on the weathered desk with a bottle to his lips. Silently Cas comes down and together they pull the huge metal garage door down with a rattle and a clash, a stony silence that echoes afterward, and Cas leans against the desk and takes a beer from Dean and puts it to his own lips, and they drink quietly together. Fire trucks glimmering red under the buzzing lights, a few moths battering at them, and Cas thinks that in the silence there is a kind of undertow—a pushing and pulling that he feels in his throat, as if from a very great distance, and it rises and falls in his ears while they lean and drink together and only dissipates when Dean smacks him lightly on the knee and says, “I'm heading up.”  
  


For a moment it had almost felt as if they were underwater already. Boxed up in a big, echoing coffin while new oceans form on top of them and moonlight scatters through waves against the fiberglass of Sam's skylight, broken and shattered on the surface of the sea.  
  


He heads up, too.  
  


* * *

  
  


Fifteen days. An issue, in the last four, has arisen: there is nothing to do.  
  


There are a few board games in an upstairs closet, but none of them are particularly in the mood for Monopoly or Scrabble. Sam, to Cas' eyes, looks as if he hasn't quite made it out from the cacophony of white and yellow light and the blackness of his room—he looks tired, far away, but says nothing of his sleep. Only scratches at his arms occasionally, folds and unfolds the blankets on his bed.  
  


Dean pulls the Impala inside the garage and fixes everything on her there is to be fixed. He rearranges and organises the weapons in the trunk to a degree that surprises even Cas—in all his years with these boys he's never seen it so tidy. Every gun and shell in its proper place. Rosaries arrayed along the trunk's false bottom, dangling like beaded curtains.  
  


For his part, he cleans—finds a few brooms and rids the garage floor of dead crickets, making neat piles of the folders on the firehouse desk, on the off chance that anyone ever comes back to this place to appreciate the thought. Makes his bed and Dean's even though no one is around to see them in disarray. It takes a little of the summer weight off his back, to make himself work. It's quiet all the time.  
  


On the second firehouse day Dean enlisted them both to walk down the street with him, to pull plywood off of curbs and unemptied dumpsters and haul it back under their arms. Castiel's palms are full of splinters. He sits cross-legged on the scrap heap inside the station fence, itchy with chigger bites, watching Dean nail the boards across the windows on the lower floor, as if they will somehow keep the pressure of the water out, when it comes. As if he can make this place into a buried treasure chest, a sunken ark. Three living things that might emerge when—if—the Flood recedes. If.  
  


He watches Dean work and feels a sadness creeping into his chest. The determined movements of his arms and legs, his shoulders, fingers holding hammer and nail. The way he shakes out his hand as if to shake pain out of it and goes right back to it. He can't stop thinking about it—the realisation he'd had, a week or so ago, the realisation that he's very much in love with this part of Dean Winchester, the part that is determined to keep moving. To survive. Dean knows just as well as he does that this plywood isn't going to do a damn thing, but he hammers it anyway. Closes up the firehouse anyway, with the confidence and the set jaw of a man who knows exactly what he's doing and has every conviction that it will do its job. He has so much faith in metal and solid things, and it's seen him this far through life. There's something noble in that. But it's sad.  
  


Sometimes he's tempted to get up off the scrap heap and put a hand on Dean's shoulder and tell him there's no point, but that would be stepping on something sacred and breaking it to pieces and he can't do that. Instead he indulges him, holds nails sometimes when Dean needs him to, both of them sweating under the turbulent sun, the backs of their necks wet. He catches Dean staring at the hollow of his throat more than once. A few times they stand, both of them breathing, once Dean has finished boarding up a window, and the nails are warm and black in Castiel's outstretched hand, and they look at one another askance, and though Cas can't put words or name to it there's an understanding that passes between them. A silent _thank you_ in three or four different incarnations that just _is,_ there in the air in the space separating their bodies. _Thank you for holding the nails. Thank you for being here. Thank you for indulging this stupid pointless project. Thank you for seeing why I have to do this stuff._ To which Castiel hopes he silently replies, _you're welcome. Thank you for not losing the part of yourself I love the most._  
  
  


At some point—perhaps on the fourth afternoon of the firehouse—Cas realises, quite without fanfare, that the affection he feels towards Dean is much bigger than he'd thought, and that he loves— _all_ of him. Not just the survival instinct, not just the stubbornness, but all of him, and always has, and it's only under the beating, throbbing heat of a birdless day that it finally makes sense to him. _Oh,_ he thinks. _Oh._ He bites his lip and holds the nails for Dean and doesn't say anything.  
  


He feels a bit stupid, really, that it took him this long to figure it out. Maybe it's just one of those truths brought on by the looming idea of their imminent deaths; he doesn't know, and doesn't really care.  
  


He's not going to say anything, he decides, as he follows Dean around the corner to a door they don't use, a huge scrap of plywood leaning against the wall. He bites his lip some more and focuses on the trail of muscle beneath Dean's arm.  
  


He _can't_ say anything. It wouldn't be good for any of them. The afternoon marches on, away from his new little piece of truth. In its way, it leaves him behind.  
  


* * *

  
  


Dean keeps the radio on during the day, loud and hammering through the garage. It's all news, all the time. The word is still spreading. Small towns, people say, are emptying. Coasts and lakesides filling. Better to be near the water when it rises, that's what they're thinking, the people on the radio say, better to be near the water so as to be _on_ it before it can be _over_ you. There's a kind of frantic logic in it, an undertone of _I think this will work. This must work. It'll never happen. But just in case._ Cas is grateful for the point of the day when Dean finally shuts it off, closing out the stream of the airwaves as if he's closing a door on an angry metallic mob, and the deep silence falls again.  
  


Soon all the windows are boarded and the garage is darker than when they found it, even with the three working lights on, and Cas has cleaned everything there is to clean, and Sam could probably fold and unfold those blankets on his lonely bed with his eyes closed if he wanted and there are only fifteen days left until the day the Flood comes and though it's a very small number it seems to stretch for miles.  
  


After a quiet lunch microwaved in the greasy oven on the counter upstairs, Sam disappears somewhere, and Dean flops face-down on his bed as the afternoon sun paints a blank square on his back and the wall, and Cas—feeling restless in the lazy silence, the noise of cicadas outside—goes downstairs.  
  


There's a map of Hyannis, small as it is, pinned to a corkboard above the desk, with a few routes marked out in pink highlighter, a red arrow in ballpoint pen indicating the firehouse. Yawning, he traces the roads with his finger, imagining the houses, the sidewalks, the buildings hidden by the empty neatness of the map. No landmarks save a few scribbled address numbers in pencil. Two separate crosses where he presumes churches must be.  
  


A library, on Harrison Street. He licks his chapped lips and squints, tracking the twist of streets until he can trace them back to the firehouse. Books would be better than nothing. Sam might want some, too, if he can find a way inside.  
  


Quietly, so as not to wake Dean, Cas climbs the stairs again, holding the map at the forefront of his mind, and leans into Sam's room. He's not there—but the skylight is open, the latch thrown and the heavy glass covering tipped back. A hole big enough to climb through.  
  


“Sam?” he says, hushed, and hears a scraping of feet from the rooftop.  
  


Cas hesitates. Then he climbs up on Sam's bed, the mattress shifting under his feet, and he fits his fingers into the setting of the skylight.  
  


With a foot on the baseboard it isn't too hard to haul himself up through the opening and onto the roof. It's flat, littered with vents and metal pipes snaking up and back down again. The outside wall rises a little ways away, and Sam is standing there, arms folded on its ledge. A triangle of dark sweat outlines the space between his shoulders.  
  


“Sam.” Cas picks his way over what looks like a protruding air vent, and Sam turns his head. “I thought I'd find my way to the library. I wondered if you wanted me to bring you anything.”  
  


Sam doesn't answer, and Cas hadn't really expected him to. He looks as if he's in desperate need of a few hours out cold but can't seem to grab hold of them.  
  


Cas comes to stand beside him, to look out at the plains, the empty fields, the barren streets. Down by a row of houses a white plastic bag tumbles through the air, caught and blustered on an errant breeze. It's hot as Hell.  
  


For a while they exist in silence together until Sam laughs, very softly, to himself. Cas glances at him.  
  


“What?”  
  


“I've just been thinking,” Sam says, sounding incredibly overtired. “This—all of this.”  
  


Cas doesn't say anything. He rests his elbows on the wall, examines the cut of Sam's face against the sky. Exhausted and scared, sun-flushed.  
  


“When I was a kid—and I mean a really little kid, five or six,” he continues, “when I was just learning to read—for a few years around then I'd come home from school or wherever, every day, and I'd sit down on the bed in our motel room and I'd fish out the Bible from the nightstand.” Sam swallows, scrubs briefly beneath his eye with his fingertips. “I read that thing cover to cover. Straight through. Even the boring stuff— _he begat him begat him,_ all of that.” He looks down at the scrap heap far below. “Revelations was my favourite. And the Gospels.”  
  


Cas has to smile a little about that. He thinks of him, small-bodied and eager, curled up on a flat pillow with the heavy book in his hands, and smiles a little wider.  
  


“I always hated the story about Noah,” Sam says, exhaling heavily. A cloud pulls over the sun and is gone again. Cas turns his face to him, brow furrowing. “It was just— _cruel._ You know? It was always my least favourite. It made me _sad,_ it—I don't know.”  
  


He picks absently at his fingernails for a while, in the hot thick quiet, and Cas is quiet too.  
  


“And now,” Sam says, and he doesn't need to say anything else.  
  


“I'm sorry,” Cas says, as if he's responsible, somehow. He twists his lips in what he hopes is an approximation of sympathy. Sam drops his head.  
  


“This—I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the whole _point_ of that story that God was sorry, and he was never going to do it again?”  
  


“I don't think it's God.” Cas leans back on his heels, teeters, comes down again. He realises abruptly that it's something he hasn't made clear before, and wonders briefly why. “I think God is—somewhere else where he can't see or hear or care.”  
  


Sam clears his throat. “Who is it, then? Angels?”  
  


Cas shrugs. “We stole their Apocalypse from them. We didn't make them any less tired.”  
  


“They can just—do that? End the world like that if they want?”  
  


“So it would seem.”  
  


Sam goes quiet again, gnawing at the inside of his lower lip with his teeth.  
  


“It's just not fair,” he says finally, almost too low to be heard over the roar of the cicadas in the trees. “How the hell are we supposed to wrap up our whole lives in fifteen days? We can't.”  
  


“At least we have the option of trying,” Cas says slowly.  
  


“Doesn't make it any easier. I don't know.” Sam pulls with his palms at his arms, anxiously, as if something in them is making him squirm. “I just feel like—there's so much left to _do._ Places we're supposed to go, things we're supposed to see. And we won't get to. We have to hole up here and act like it's going to save us and just let this thing kill us and that's the only option we have, and it's not fair.”  
  


Cas thinks he can see the library from here, the peak of one of its roofs, a flat colour under the sun. “Every story has to end somehow,” he says.  
  


“I guess.”  
  


Sam turns his head briefly towards the open skylight, and Cas realises they must be standing over where Dean is sleeping.  
  


“You know, in every movie where the world ends—people always use the time they have to say things,” Sam says. Cas can feel his eyes, in his periphery. “Get things off their chests.”  
  


“Do you have something you want to get off your chest?”  
  


“Do you?”  
  


Cas looks at him, the strange little quirk of a smile on his face, and thinks of Dean below their feet again, and understands.  
  


He takes a breath, hot air in his lungs, the smell of sun and dust. There is less than a month's worth of calendar blocks left in the space in front of him, and Sam's not wrong. It's always in those movies, in the moments before the disaster hits or the villain acts, in the heartbeat between the build and the crash, that the flat-faced characters do drastic things. Sweep the girl into their arms and kiss her while there's still time. Tell the boy he's important and loved. The emotion that always outlasts all the others, even past rage and hate, the pretty little bow that tops every cinematic Apocalypse or CGI battle, a confession. And he's been thinking it. There's really no point in keeping it buried when it'll just rise to the surface anyway, maybe even after he's dead—drowned—floating up to the top of the sea and bursting like a little bubble. His unsteady secret.  
  


“I've been thinking lately,” he begins, and then stops, gathers himself, begins again. “That—Dean has this drive, or—surety, or whatever you want to call it, this thing that makes him think he can be indestructible if he just believes hard enough, or loves hard enough.” He swallows, unsure what the weight of Sam's gaze means, on the side of his throat. “I realised that. A week or so ago. That's--what I love about him.”  
  


“You love Dean,” Sam says, without judgment or malice or—anything, really. Only calm.  
  


Cas smiles a little, hearing that. Out loud it sounds so simple. Of course Sam knows; he's probably known for ages.  
  


“I've loved Dean for a long time,” he says. “I've—loved _you,_ too, of course, because you're both—incredibly important to me. But—”  
  


“Dean's different,” Sam says, in the exact same way, with the calmness. Another thing he knows, because it's true for him as well. The fact that Dean can't be loved in the way one loves other people. Something about him is too bright for that.  
  


Cas shrugs, acknowledging. “But—this isn't the kind of thing you talk about with Dean, and I've never—known how to go about it. So I haven't said.”  
  


He drops his head; sweat creeping down the back of his neck.  
  


“That's all.”  
  


“Well,” Sam says, “I think—honestly, I think he feels the same.”  
  


Cas looks at him, and has to wonder. If anyone would know—  
  


“And I think you should say something, and soon, and make something of it while you can, _if_ you can. Especially now.”  
  


And that's just logic, really. A clear mind to offer up to death. But Cas shakes his head.  
  


“What good would it do?” he says. “You can't wrap up a life in fifteen days.”

* * *

 

_He's standing in a prairie, an ocean of golden grass rippling and fluttering like silk in wind, and he's alone. Overhead the sky is purple, unrolling, spilled ink on the surface of the atmosphere. He looks down at grass standing at attention, to the presence of the purple sky, straight up like lightning rods and blue fire reaches down from the purple sky and meets the grass and sparks leap. Somewhere, fires begin. He feels them on the soles of his feet._   
  
  


_He looks around, swiveling on his heels, searching the yellow plains for the figures with stars in their heads, looking for Dean and Castiel. They are not here. He's alone and he feels as if his skin is shrinking to his bones. The purple sky unfolds completely and he is the only tall thing in the universe. He holds out his hand and blank drops of water appear in his palm, like eyes blinking, though it is not raining. Not yet._   
  
  


_From below the fires in his feet he feels something begin to tremble and growl. He looks up. His hair is wet. Desperately he reaches up towards the purple sky as if hoping to be lifted into it._   
  
  


_A roaring overtakes the growl, at his back, and he knows what it is, he can feel the Earth flattening behind him, but he can't look—is too scared to look. He hears his name being called and calls back, not a word but a sound, just a sound, a plea. And it comes—it comes at his back, and his alone-ness slams into his chest like a battering ram and he feels all his ribs break and fall away, and there is a great howling like the winds of a hurricane and the howling snatches up the sound of his name and it becomes an enormous rush in his ear:_ SAM!  
  


“Sam? Sam—”  
  


_And he begins to turn his head towards the roar—_   
  
  


“Sam!”  
  


And a cold hand on his face, another on his shoulder, a slash of eye and nose in blue light, a square of nighttime up above, wool blanket tangled around his foot. Awake. Castiel, shaking him. A great pressure on his chest. He gasps and the air snags inside his lungs and he latches a hand onto Castiel's wrist and bursts upward.  
  


“Sam,” Castiel is saying, “Sam, it's alright, you're awake, it's alright,” and reality brushes in like the stray touch of a cat's tail, soft and abrupt. His head is pounding, his heart is racing, and blood is rushing in his ears, a roar, and beneath it he can almost hear—  
  


The vertigo in his forearms is washing up into his throat and it is absolutely dizzying and he thinks he might be sick until his forehead meets Castiel's shoulder and suddenly he can breathe.  
  


“It's alright,” Cas is saying in his ear, somehow louder than the blood hammering in his head and Sam can breathe enough to sob, now, which is the first thing he does.  
  


Awake. Safe. Upstairs in the Hyannis firehouse in his little skylight room, Cas holding him, Dean—somewhere—probably hovering in the doorway, or maybe behind Cas, even—he can't see. He doesn't think about it—just pushes forward into Cas' shoulder and curls his fingers up against his own chest and tries to get some real breath in between the seizing of his heart.  
  


Bizarrely, the only thing he can think, once his mind regains itself, is _I wonder what day it is._ Purple clouds are curling violently behind his eyelids so he focuses as hard as he can on Cas' cool hand on the back of his neck, fingers threading up a little into his hair, the way Dean's did when he was a child, and he focuses on Cas' lips resting on the crown of his head. He doesn't know how the hell he woke Cas up, but he's glad that, somehow, he did.  
  


“What day is it?” Sam stammers out, taking a deep breath through his nose to calm himself, to be able to lift his head and speak. He can feel how wide his eyes are. Something cold and wet is sliding down his face from the corners of his eyes; he doesn't remember beginning to cry. The careful calendar of Last Days he's been keeping in his head since they found this town has gone away somewhere into the safe part of his mind and he suddenly, desperately, needs to know how much time they have left. “How many—how many days?”  
  


Cas looks at him, as footsteps sound in the doorway and Dean's anxious silhouette pulls in. “Ten,” Cas says, looking concerned.  
  


The last four have flown by like departing birds, but he remembers now.  
  


More hands on him, then, Dean's hands, Dean's voice saying “Are you okay?,” not bothering to ask _what happened_ because at this point it must be clear; Dean's voice saying “Sammy, hey, are you okay?”  
  


He says “Yeah, I think so—I think so, I'm sorry,” and Dean says, in a rush of relief, “Don't be sorry, come on,” and hugs him—hugs him so tightly Sam thinks his ribs are going to break, just as in his dream, break and fall away.  
  


It's a disproportionate embrace for something as harmless as a nightmare. But something tells him it's not entirely about the dream. Not really.  
  


* * *

  
  


Dean leaves the room as soon as Sam is asleep again, his face buried in his pillow and the ghost-trails of their hands still echoing on his skin like pale tongues of fire. Cas lingers, but Dean knows he won't linger long; for a moment he stands in the doorway, his eyes heavy and rough with sleep, looking back at the huddled mass of brother and friend on Sam's bed: Castiel's hand, gently laid on the back of Sam's, and the flash of moonlight in his eyes, directed down. He feels something that he doesn't have a name for—not yet—stirring a little in him, to see that, to see the tenderness and concern with which Castiel looks at Sam, the almost tangible trust that seems to exist in the air between them. It makes him happy, and very sad, all at once.  
  


He needs a drink.  
  


He feels tight, still, in the crooks of his arms. He'd betrayed something when he'd held Sam that closely—his fear, the fear he's been trying to tamp down ever since they got here.  
  


Now, Dean thinks, is not a good time for nightmares, or for anything that reeks of the inexplicable. It's not a good time for people to be losing sleep or scaring others awake with their thrashing in the dark. Things like that are beginning to scare him, irrationally, because they speak to the bigness and the authority of what is coming and how absolutely powerless he is to stop it.  
  


Part of him wants to take Sam by the shoulders, shake him. _Don't you drown on me,_ he wants to say. _Don't you drown on me yet. It's not time._  
  
  


He finds his way in the dark to the stairwell and feels his way down it with a hand flat against the wall.  
  


When his hand meets the light switches in the garage only two of the fluorescent lamps light up; the third fizzes and dies, and he frowns. The refrigerator in one of the front rooms hums when he opens it and he pulls out a cardboard six-pack, now reduced to three cold bottles, and takes them all with him. He's shaken. He wishes Sam would _talk_ about the nightmares, so at least he could shoulder some of their weight, and Cas could too.  
  


On a whim he scales the side of one of the fire trucks, pulling himself up on his forearms and with his knees pushed into crevices and niches, beer clasped between his two first fingers, and he sits down on its top edge with his legs hanging over the sides. Cold chrome and aluminum against his bare legs, the corner of some piece of metal equipment digging into the small of his back. The _pop_ of the bottlecap is too loud in the garage.  
  


He feels delirious; if it were daylight he'd think he almost had a fever, given the way things are focusing and unfocusing before his eyes, the heaviness in his sockets, but it's just exhaustion. It's just fear. Beer goes down cold and slightly burning and pushes him just a bit more fully into wakefulness and it's just enough. His eyes settle. He breathes.  
  


How long has it been? Thirty days. Just a month. Thirty days ago the universe took it upon itself to begin shutting down—or the angels had started it, or God. Someone had pulled a great lever and turned the cogs and gears that would rush the seas up from the seabeds and overwhelm the Earth, and he doesn't know who, exactly, and doesn't know why, either, and will probably never know. _Goddamn._ How can anything end that quickly?  
  


In the last few days, when he's been alone, he has tried to hold his breath for as long as possible, tried to imagine kicking for the surface. Every time he loses the game and exhales the fear tightens a little more around his heart.  
  


Cas is right to be cynical; Sam is right to be dazed and far-away. They're both removing themselves from optimism and reality, and they seem so much calmer than he feels. Even though he's been keeping his face neutral and his actions hopeful and though he tries, whenever doubt comes into his mind, to remind himself that they've survived End Times before _,_ he knows in the deep parts of himself that he's not neutral, not hopeful, not calm. Half of him is steel and wants desperately, animalistically, to do nothing but ensure his own survival; the other half is bleak and white and knows it's foolish, and it's hard to ignore the bleak white part when Sam is upstairs and Castiel is watching over him while he sleeps because he's probably dreaming of dying the way he knows they all will die.  
  


Abruptly there are footsteps on the stairs and he thinks, _thank God._  
  
  


Cas comes into the white light, quiet and small, and leans against the threshold of the stairway.  
  


“Can't sleep?” Cas says.  
  


Dean shrugs; he gestures with his bottle towards the two beers left in the cardboard pack on the desk. “Don't intend to.” And he doesn't, really. Sleep sounds like a bad idea for some reason.  
  


Cas shifts his weight, glancing back up the stairs as if to listen for signs of Sam waking. There are none. He looks back to Dean, high up above the garage floor on the fire truck, and smiles a little, gently.  
  


“Room for me?”  
  


Dean kicks against the side of the truck with his bare heel in acknowledgment, and watches Cas move across the concrete floor—barefoot, blue boxers, one of Dean's old AC/DC T-shirts, too big and hanging from his shoulders like drapery—and pull a bottle from the pack.  
  


He climbs up nimbly to sit next to Dean, and hands Dean his bottle to crack open. In all his human-time Cas never did get the hang of those stupid tiny little ridged caps; they bit into his hands and made him frown in a way Dean didn't like. Dean realises, as he's twisting it open for him, that he's been doing this for the last three years, the same twist of the hand, the same crush of metal and skin, and it's such a small thing, but it's something they've shared, and it's theirs.  
  


One more addition to the list of good things gone too soon.  
  


They sit in silence for a while—a supremely comfortable silence, Dean finds—their legs dangling off the edge of the fire truck, the lights buzzing above, Sam sleeping in his little box of a room upstairs, hopefully unplagued by dreams. He can easily say he's never thought to find himself in a place like this under circumstances like these. But there are worse places to be. Alone, for one. He's glad he's not alone.  
  


“Thank you,” he says, before he realises he intends to say anything, and Cas looks at him, confused, his brow bunched up in that sweet way it has. Dean blinks, looks away, down into the neck of his almost-empty bottle.  
  


“For what?”  
  


He shrugs, unsure exactly how to put it into words.  
  


“You've been—I dunno. You've been looking after Sam a lot, and I—I appreciate it,” he says, rather lamely, hoping it comes across the right way. “I don't really have a great track record with his—you know. His psychic stuff.” He takes a deep breath. “So thank you. You know. For looking out for him with that. Since I don't—really know how to.”  
  


Dean gnaws at his lower lip; he knows he doesn't sound half as grateful as he actually is. He supposes he just has to hope that Cas understands how much it means, that someone has as much affection and care for Sam in their heart as he does, and shows it.  
  


Cas tips his bottle back into his mouth, his head coming back, and Dean glances at the hollow of his throat, traces it up the incline of his Adam's apple to his chin to his lips, and swallows. There's a haze floating behind his eyes. He feels as if he's on the edge of something, and not just the fire truck—something quiet and small that's been sitting unacknowledged at the base of his skull for weeks, even years, without a name to put to it, and now it's moving a little, in the rhythm of the rise and fall of Cas' throat. He swallows again.  
  


Cas holds the bottle between his open knees and his shoulders hunch a little, but he smiles, weary, in Dean's direction.  
  


“It's nothing,” he says, with a sadness in him. “No more than what I'd do for you.”  
  


Dean thinks about that, for a moment. Holds it in his mind. He's not the type anymore to shoot awake from nightmares but he can, with surprising ease, imagine Castiel sitting there with him, soothing the fear away with a cool hand, an embrace, and he's a little jealous of the idea. Almost wishes he could have that kind of fear, and the soothing of it, but the envy burns away as quickly as it's come.  
  


“You guys have gotten pretty close.” He takes a last pull from his bottle and then sets it aside, precarious on a smooth ledge of the fire truck. “It's—good.”  
  


Cas nods, and seems to ruminate on that for a moment; he squints a little in the buzzing fluorescent glow, his toes curling and uncurling, and the hollow of his throat is deep and clean and Dean finds hazily that he wants to touch it, somehow.  
  


“We've had good conversations,” Cas says. He pulls in his mouth in the way that means he's holding something back.  
  


“Yeah?” Dean says, with gentle curiosity.  
  


Cas turns his head to him, looking at him with a searching depth that Dean hasn't seen in his eyes in years—not since the last time grace flowed through his veins, anyway. As if he's trying to gauge how much he is allowed to say. _You can say anything,_ Dean thinks, matching his gaze even though it makes him feel as if his soul is being laid bare. _You can say anything to me. I thought you knew that._  
  
  


Something's about to break, or fall, or wake up. Dean isn't sure. But he feels abruptly as if he's been waiting for it for years and he is very, very tired of waiting.  
  


“Sam thinks,” Cas says—and there it goes—“that I should tell you that I love you.”  
  


The lights buzz; somewhere a generator hums; a wash of cicada sound rises and collapses outside, and they're still looking at each other, side by side atop the fire truck. And nothing at all is different; nothing has changed. It's that simple.  
  


Yes, Dean thinks. Yes, he's been waiting for that for a long time.  
  


Cas turns his head away again, swallowing, looking down at the concrete floor below. “But I told him, _what's the point?_ He said you can't wrap up a life in fifteen days, and you certainly can't wrap up a life in ten, and that's all we have. I didn't intend to tell you.” He takes a long pull on his beer. He smiles wryly, at himself, at something. “I suppose this is me _not_ telling you.”  
  


“You love me?” Dean says, and is somehow not at all shocked to hear how comfortable those words are in his mouth. As if he's asking for clarification on the time of night, for God's sake. It surprises him so little, even though, under any other circumstances, with any other person, it should be rocking his entire world; but now the nameless thing sitting in his skull that's been stirring has a name, and he's wondering why the hell it took either of them this long to _get_ it.  
  


Cas shrugs. “I've always loved you,” he says. He sounds tired, but whether from being woken in the middle of the night or from the weight of the secret, Dean can't tell. “A few days ago I—thought about it, really, more than I'd had a chance to before. I'd always felt there was no difference between loving someone and being _in_ love with them. Not for me. Not until I gave it thought. But there is—a line, isn't there? A distinction.”  
  


“Yeah.” Dean examines his face. His heart isn't beating as quickly as the movies would have him believe it's supposed to, and there's something triumphantly wonderful in that. “I guess there is.”  
  


“So I knew what it was but I told Sam I wouldn't tell you,” Cas says, sighing, leaning back against the folded ladder atop the fire truck; Dean can see the silver metal cutting into his shoulder-blades, making them stand out in sharp angles. “We don't have the time to figure something like that out. We don't have the capability anymore. Better—to just let it die, I thought.”  
  


Dean can't think of anything to say that will make any kind of sense. The shape of Cas' body is like a burr under the haze of cheap alcohol and everything he's saying, little hooks snaring Dean's eyes—the curl of his hands around the condensation-wet bottle, the edge of his thumb toying at the peeling paper label, the way his shirt falls in on itself with the rise and fall of his chest and concave belly, and God, he really is beautiful, isn't he. Sleep-mussed and unshaven, looking like he rolled off someone's couch in the middle of the night, but there's still—all that history, all the things Dean knows about the man sitting next to him, that lend weight to his body, familiarity, affection, hell—yes. Love. Truly.  
  


“What'd—what'd Sam say?” It comes out stupidly, stumbling on his tongue, but he's too busy rebuking himself to care. _Dean, you dumb sonofabitch._ His lips feel numb and warm.  
  


“He thinks you feel the same,” Cas says, and doesn't look at him, seems almost afraid to look at him, “and that if you do—we should make something of it. But I worry.”  
  


“Why?”  
  


“I told him—” Cas gnaws on his lip, grinds his teeth into it hard, looking off into the middle distance, and Dean has to wonder what strength has kept them both down all this time and how hard it is to rise over it now, and he's almost proud, really, that Cas is being this brave, that he himself is being brave enough to listen, even though it's small and harmless and has no sharp edges at all. “I told him that the part of you I love the most is your drive--to live, your ridiculous will to survive anything and everything—whatever it is in you that makes you board up windows and talk about _afterwards,_ I just worry—”  
  


“What?”  
  


“I worry that if he's right, if you do feel the same—”  
  


“I do,” Dean says, “I do feel the same.” And it's as if someone's smacked him across the face, bluntly and without malice, and it's true, and _Lord,_ but he's a goddamned _idiot_ for not having figured it out before.  
  


Cas stops speaking, and looks at him again, and he shifts, draws one leg up onto the fire truck and turns his body towards him, as if he's trying to compound with sincerity everything he's saying and Dean wants to say _no, don't do that, just talk to me like we've been talking, like this is normal and real because that's what it is, isn't it? There's nothing incredible here. We knew it all along._  
  
  


Cas ducks his dark head beneath the humming fluorescent glow.  
  


“I worry it'll give you false hope,” he says.  
  


Dean laughs a little at that, confused, and turns his body too, the better to see him, the better to speak, putting them back into equilibrium, and Cas looks up at him from beneath his brows.  
  


“False hope about what?”  
  


Cas pulls his eyes away, to the side.  
  


“The Flood isn't going to stop because we've said it. Because we love each other,” he says, quietly. “And nothing good will come of forming more bonds when they'll just be washed away. We stand to lose too much already.”  
  


Dean swallows hard, tilts his head towards Cas' until he pulls his eyes back again; hesitantly, unsure how this is supposed to work, he lets a few shaky fingertips touch the back of Castiel's resting hand, and Cas breathes a shivering little breath.  
  


“So what?” Dean says. There's a little glint in the corner of Castiel's eye, welling, a forlornness on his face. “If everything happens the way you think it's gonna happen, I'm gonna lose you anyway. So who cares what you are when that happens? It won't make it hurt any more or any less.”  
  


“I just wanted to spare you pain,” Cas whispers, looking ashamed of himself, and he closes his eyes briefly as if to shut in tears.  
  


“I'd rather die honest,” Dean says.  
  


He touches his stuttering hand to the curve of Castiel's jaw and tips his head up, forward, and kisses him.  
  


In the dark behind his closed eyes he feels the universe narrow down to the bright little point where their lips are meeting, and Cas is so quiet, leaning so gently in, that he's worried he's hurt him or scared him or made a drastic and terrible mistake, but then he feels a breath being taken from against his cheek and two arms coming up against his back and the curve of Cas' brow settling against his shoulder, and the kiss is over, but the world is not. Not yet. And they're sitting on top of a fire truck in the middle of a ghost town, and he doesn't know what time it is, but he knows there _is_ time, however little, and he can grasp that much.  
  


“I'm glad you told me,” he murmurs, against Castiel's neck. “I'm really glad you told me that.” And he feels the cool hand between his shoulder-blades, holding, pressing, claiming, as gentle as a spoken word.  
  


* * *

  
  


When they go upstairs, they don't hold hands or intertwine their arms; it's too late and too quiet for things like that. But they climb the stairs together, shoulders side-by-side, and when they reach the silent top floor they orbit in gentle circles around one another in the dark—peering into Sam's skylight room, where he is sleeping peacefully; making their way back into their beds, folding and unfolding, rearranging pillows, close-mouthed, until at some eventual moment they find themselves standing in the space between their bedsteads and glancing at each other's black shapes and then climbing, without a word, onto their separate mattresses.  
  


They don't kiss again, and don't speak. But they lie awake for a long time, listening to the night noises die down outside in the endless quiet of Hyannis, looking at—or into—each other over the aisle, every breath traded between them somehow affirming everything that had been said downstairs, and this is how they fall asleep: arms outstretched towards one another into the empty space, fingers caught up lightly, still a little awkward in the newness, but all the more comfortable in its strange familiarity.  
  


* * *

  
  


It's a deep sleep they're woken from, some number of hours later, when a hand shakes them both from slumber and Dean opens his eyes to a blue-skinned apparition of Sam, painted dusky with early morning light, standing between them. Even in the chiseled shadows of his face Dean can see that he's afraid.  
  


Cas stirs and opens his eyes, the same deep colour of the breaking day, and they sit up in unison.  
  


“What's the matter?” Dean says, reaching out until his fingers meet Sam's wrist, and Sam swallows hard.  
  


“Listen,” he says.  
  


Silence falls, and they obey, until it intrudes upon Dean's awareness that it isn't completely silent after all.  
  


Above their heads, a faint drumming sound—a _tap tap tap_ ping, steady, growing louder by the minute.  
  


“It's the rain,” Sam says, and they lift their faces to the flattened ceiling as the tattoo beats—harder, louder, faster, until—with a sound like thunder—it becomes a roar.


	3. diluvian

The radio talks about a universal downpour.  
  


The sky over Nebraska is dark, the colour of dusk, and the storm paints everything in shades of grey and blue. It hammers leaves from trees, pockmarks the gravel roads with pits and holes, beats tall waving grass down into submission against the Earth; every now and again a streak of brilliant lightning crashes in the distance, and thunder bellows, and the echoes of the light flicker like heartbeats across the vast blue backdrop of the atmosphere.  
  


It's almost eleven o'clock, and still only just light enough to see by, when all three of them pile anxiously into the Impala to drive the three or four roads to the grocery store, to strip it of anything they can use. Already water is running in sheaths down the slick roads, and though Dean's grip on her wheel is steady, she hydroplanes dangerously, swerving up onto the sidewalk and back down again with a growling of her tires.  
  


Cas looks at his face in the rearview mirror. His jaw is clenched tight and Cas knows that after this, the streets won't be safe for the old girl anymore, and thinks how wrong it is—that the last journey of a car as important as this is less than a mile long.  
  


Though it's nearly impossible to hear the local station over the storm, Dean keeps the radio on anyway as they crawl through the empty town and make the precarious turn into the parking lot of the grocery store.  
  


As far as anyone can tell, the panicked host says, in his tin voice, it is raining everywhere, worldwide, and this should not be possible. This should not be happening.  
  


Dean rolls the Impala up onto the walkway outside the store, under the overhang, and parks her.  
  


“Okay,” he says, in a voice far calmer than Cas knows he actually is, turning in his seat. “Grab anything edible, and soap, toilet paper, water, all of it, as much as you can carry, alright? Take the friggin' baskets if you need to. I don't know if it's gonna be safe to come back here or how long we're gonna be in that firehouse. I'm not taking any chances.”  
  


Sam and Cas don't say anything; they just nod. The fear they're all feeling is palpable.  
  


They don't stay long in the store. Flashlights tucked under their arms, waving desperate arcs of white onto the tall echoing walls, they move down aisles one by one, filling red plastic baskets with everything from boxes of pasta to frozen TV dinners.  
  


In the middle of the pharmacy, stuffing first aid kits into the crook of his elbow, Cas pauses to listen to the swelling sound of the storm. He can't tell if it's getting louder, or if he's just imagining it. Either way, the store is humid and rain-cold and anxious and he wants very much to get back to the firehouse, to close and bar the doors, to retreat to those tiny rooms upstairs where everyone can be together and warm and safe.  
  


Fifteen minutes later they're outside again, packing everything they've stolen into all the nooks and crannies of the trunk and the back-seat, too. The water is rising on the street and it arcs away from the Impala's tires when they pull away, all of them muddled and nervous, and Hyannis reduced to muddy colours streaking down the windows, buildings dissolving like sand castles or sugar cubes.  
  


It takes thirty minutes to get back to the firehouse only three blocks away, and when they arrive, Sam and Dean wade through the standing water to open the garage door and bring the Impala inside. Cas climbs into the front seat to direct it into the golden square of light, his fingers white-knuckled on the steering wheel, and the metal door opens with a crash and thunder claps at almost the exact same moment, and his heart is thudding in his chest like a jackhammer.  
  


This is the rain; he knows it will go on without stopping for these last ten days, and then—  
  


Somehow he manages to drive the Impala into the garage without skidding off to either side, and when the door crashes back down behind him there is a sincere silence on the lower firehouse floor, a dimming of the rain to a dull seethe at the back of his skull.  
  


Wordlessly, he helps Sam carry armfuls of food and necessities up to the second floor, and Dean—soaked to the skin and shivering—hauls plywood from the empty front room, and while they work, piling the things they took onto the upstairs counter and floor and the corners of Sam's skylight room, he stands in front of the downstairs doors, hammer in his hand, and gnaws the skin from his lip.  
  


Cas pauses at the top of the stairs, looking down at him, the tense line of his back. He knows, and Dean knows, that boarding up the door won't do them a damn bit of good once the water really starts rising. It'll find its way in somehow and they'll be trapped on the upper floor, and then—well, then the Flood will do its work.  
  


But he goes to him anyway, quietly takes a handful of nails from the rusted firehouse toolbox on the floor, and Dean looks at him, and he looks back.  
  


“Better than nothing, right?” Dean says, quietly, and Cas nods, and together they barricade the door. The sound of the hammer is drowned in the roar of the rain.  
  


Cas doesn't think a firehouse in Nebraska will keep sandbags in its storerooms, but he's pleasantly surprised to find a closet full of them, lying on the floor in uneven piles. They drag the bags across the concrete floor and lay them against the metal garage doors, to keep them from buckling in, if they can.  
  


They don't speak. There's too much work to be done, more doors to board up, things to carry upstairs. Dean pauses, once, as he's closing up a back door with more fruitless plywood against the inevitable, and the hammer goes a little limp in his hand, and for a moment Cas thinks he's just going to give up and realise how useless all this is—those instincts at war in his mind again—and he touches his shoulder gently.  
  


“Do what you have to,” he says. Dean nods, sharply, breathes, straightens, and takes the last two nails from Castiel's palm, and Cas keeps a hand in the space between his shoulders while he works, to steady him.  
  


* * *

  
  


There's no panic in this, the final settling-in, and that surprises Sam a little.  
  


He's sitting cross-legged on the floor upstairs, quietly organising cans and jars and boxes into neat stacks and piles against the wall. Dean is downstairs, and from the sound of it he seems to be moving something heavy and rough—cinderblocks, maybe—across the concrete floor. Blocking up the Impala's wheels, probably, to keep her from drifting on the wet surface once the water seeps in, as they all know it will.  
  


Cas, standing at the counter to his right, is examining the little propane stove Sam had had the presence of mind to snatch from a shelf in the grocery store, and opening drawers experimentally to see what other tools they have for cooking and eating. When Sam glances up at him, his face is calm but concentrated—the narrowly focused gaze of someone determined to stitch themselves totally to their work, and shut out everything else.  
  


Really, Sam thinks, if he pretends briefly that what's looming over all of them isn't coming, the situation doesn't seem so bad. They're warm, safe, dry, with two weeks' worth of food, something to heat it with, and beds and blankets and a lifetime of survival skills. If he didn't know any better, this could almost be a hunt gone slightly awry—the three of them trapped in some building for a while, not in any real danger, only inconvenienced.  
  


He stacks cans of Campbell's soup in a red-and-white labeled pyramid.  
  


And they're together, too. All three of them. Even in the face of the truth, there's that.  
  


The worst thing, so far, on this anxious home stretch, is the vertigo. It's no longer contained to his arms. Now it washes up and down his back, like a strong breeze, and trembles in his knees as well, and fills his head with a static hum and a feeling that everything is tipping back and forth like a ship rocked on turbulent waters. His inner ear must be shot to hell, although he hasn't got a clue why, and isn't particularly inclined to find out.  
  


Cas finishes tinkering with the camping stove and sits down abruptly beside him, dipping his hand into the tumbled pile of unsorted pasta boxes and pulling out a few of like brand. Sam looks at him, and Cas smiles softly but says nothing. Working silently, comfortably, glad of something repetitive and patterned to busy themselves with, they make neat and sturdy stacks, sorted by shape and colour, and Sam thinks that it's a little absurd, putting this much effort into a makeshift pantry they'll only disrupt anyway. The roar of the rain is steady, and it's good to have something that can be controlled.  
  


When Dean comes, finally, upstairs, he moves past them and his hand brushes over Sam's shoulder as if to be sure that he's real, and it brushes over Cas' shoulder, too, and stays there. Cas looks up at Dean, above Sam's line of sight, and Sam looks at Cas—sees the softness in his eyes, and finds himself relishing it.  
  


Dean and Cas had been almost touching, last night, when he'd woken to the sound of the rain beginning. They'd been reaching for one another and he'd known, dimly, at the back of his mind, to be called out and catalogued in a moment of smaller fear, that they'd talked about what he'd hoped.  
  


Cas had been right; no amount of double-digit days are enough to tie an entire lifetime up in a bow and call it done. Ten days isn't nearly long enough for an affection kept secret that long to be brought out, polished off, used and worn and appreciated, to the fullest extent. It isn't nearly long enough for every kiss and embrace Sam knows in his heart they've both been itching for, for weeks if not months, if not years, and it makes him sad. But at least they've said something; at least there's that. And Dean sits down next to Cas, crosslegged too, and quietly joins their work, and none of them say a word.  
  


The food piles up into rows and stacks as pretty as a Norman Rockwell picture, rounds and blocks and flats of bright colours, and when they're done they look at it for longer than they should: their stockpile of things to survive upon. Sam almost wishes they had a camera. It's such a small thing, but right now it feels like an enormous accomplishment.  
  


When they move, finally, Cas picks up a box of pasta and a jar of Prego and hunts for something small enough for the camping stove to cook them in. He finds pans beneath the firehouse's oven, and Sam gets up and goes into his skylight room to wait for the food to be ready. He hears the creak of springs as Dean sits down on his bed, and he moves into the darkness of the little square place he's picked for himself, and climbs onto his own bed.  
  


The skylight doesn't give much glow from what meager sun there is. A flash of lightning washes across its surface and picks out, for an instant, the bulbs and skidding droplets of rain, the fluid wash of water as it runs over the glass slope. If he squints, the individuality of the raindrops vanishes, and all is perfect purple-blue, the clouds scattered through the patina of the water, and he can almost imagine that it goes up forever into the distant sky, that Hyannis, Nebraska now sits at the bottom of the Midwestern American Sea. That he's a deep-water diver floating precariously within a shipwreck, gazing up towards the open air, wherever it might be.  
  


A rush of imbalance pushes through his spine, through his stomach, and he closes his eyes, swallows hard. More lightning flashes behind his eyes. His fingers prickle, as if stuck with a thousand tiny pins.  
  


* * *

  
  


By the middle of the night the rain is deafening, so much so that Sam can't even hope to sleep.  
  


No streetlights are alive to break up the darkness in Hyannis. The skylight room is absolute black; when he waves a hand in front of his face he can't even see its motion. Every now and then a purple streak of lightning shoots across the opening in the ceiling and leaves spots floating across his eyes.  
  


He gets up. The concrete floor is cold beneath his feet and there is the pervasive scent of damp and rain.  
  


It's almost as dark in the other room, too, but there's at least a little moonlight given way through the thick yellowed window, enough to see the provisions by. Sam crouches down, swaying on his feet with the push and pull of the trapped tide in his body, and fights down nausea, fingers searching for the tell-tale plastic crackle of a bottle of water. When he finds one he opens it and sits against the wall, facing the beds where Dean and Cas sleep, oblivious to him.  
  


When a flash of light bursts into the room he sees the dark huddled mass of them—in the same bed, tonight, he realises wearily. The way they're sprawled makes him think that one of them crawled into the bed of the other sometime after the latter had fallen asleep, had burrowed into the space not occupied by their body to seek safe haven from the drumming of the rain or the itch of being alone.  
  


He sits there, feet flat against the chill floor, waiting for lightning to show him their bodies again, as if every time they are brought into being by the persistence of light they will become truer and truer, something safe and endless and kind that he can tie to his wrists like an anchor.  
  


* * *

  
  


When Cas wakes, Dean isn't in bed anymore, but there are pale red marks on Castiel's arm where Dean had slept across it, flung out across the mattress. His face is buried in the pillow, blankets askew, and the sheets smell like Dean, like cool wet skin and leather; for a brief moment he thinks that everything that's happened, the weeks of confusion and fear, have all been a very long and vivid nightmare. But then the upper room of the firehouse settles in, the hard unkind springs of the mattress pinching up against the small of his back, the pounding of the storm above his head, and he sits up, disappointed.  
  


Dean is making coffee in a percolator stolen from the grocery store. The overhead lights are on, buzzing and greenish, their glow filling the oppressive walls in a way that makes Cas feel trapped. Leaning against the headboard, he watches Dean for a while, and then glances out the window. Nothing but blues and purples and deep blacks, a world rendered mute by some Impressionist brush, as far as he can see. Even the red light of the distant radio tower has been sloughed away.  
  


Sam comes out of his room a while later, stumbling with sleep but drawn by the smell of the coffee as it brews in the percolator, and he sits down heavily on an unoccupied bed and holds his face in his hands for a long time. For the first time Cas realises exactly how tired he is, and how tired the brothers must be, now that they have nothing to do with themselves but wait, now that all the figuring and running and planning is done.  
  


The coffee is weak when Dean hands it to them in mugs from beneath the counter, but it's warm, and Cas takes his gratefully, holding it tightly in his hands. Sam smiles a little in thanks and takes his own back into the skylight room, and Dean watches him go back into the dark with worry chiseled into his face.  
  


He sits down next to Cas, and neither of them say anything about having ended up in the same bed, but then, there's really no need to discuss it. Cas leans his shoulder against Dean's, gently, unassuming.  
  


* * *

  
  


There are books, on a small untidy shelf above the cabinets—political thrillers and spy novels and horror stories, mostly, small thick brick-like books with cheap grey pages and titles embossed in slick metallic print. There's a deck of cards, too, in a drawer full of rubber bands and tape and postage stamps and bottle openers, and these keep them occupied for a while. Dean convinces Sam to play a few games of Crazy Eights with them, and while it lasts Cas can feel all of their moods lifting, miraculously. Sam even manages to laugh, once, when he wins. For an instant they're simply stuck inside on a rainy day, restless but safe, and only the sound of thunder breaks their smiles for an hour or two.  
  


Lunch is peanut butter sandwiches on Wonderbread and Cas thinks that maybe this waiting game won't be so bad after all, if they can keep themselves bright-eyed and busy. Maybe—when the water finally does come, after all this rain—maybe it will even be a kind of surprise, and over more quickly.  
  


He tries not to think about the fact that, for all Dean's precautions and all their stockpiling, none of it is going to save them.  
  


There is a morbid sort of calm that comes with knowing one is going to die, and soon. It makes it easier for him to cross the room to where Dean is sitting up on his bed, reading something absently, and kiss his temple, or touch his cheek, and it makes it simpler to receive the embraces Dean gives him in return every few hours, suddenly and without explanation. It gives him a reason to kiss the top of Sam's head in passing when he feels like it. He finds that he—all of them, for that matter—are becoming quick to touch one another, often without reason, and it isn't hard to see why. They should have had thirty, forty years ahead of them, still, to kiss and embrace and touch in the ways that families and lovers do. Instead they have nine days. It isn't fair. It's almost as if they are trying, subconsciously, to squeeze those stolen years into the space that's left to them, and not a one of them is questioning it.  
  


* * *

  
  


“There's water on the floor,” Dean says, that evening, when he comes back up from downstairs, everything of value from the Impala clutched in his arms. He says it without emotion.  
  


Cas goes to the top of the stairwell to look down the long narrow passage at the rectangle of dim light below. The grey concrete is stained darker than before. He swallows, runs a hand across his mouth.  
  


“It won't rise yet,” he says. “We have a few days left.”  
  


Dean doesn't say anything. Sam, from his room, doesn't say anything either. For the rest of the night there is quiet.  
  


* * *

  
  


All of them sleep, in various states of unease and restlessness, well into the eighth day before the end of the world, too tired and worn out with anxiety to get up and move around much before one or two o'clock in the afternoon. When Dean finally gets up, it's only to venture downstairs again to retrieve the wireless radio from the desk, and it's the last thing he brings up from the floor below. Cas sees a faint ring of dark on the hems of Dean's Levi's, but doesn't ask about the level of the water. Dean tunes the radio to a station that seems to be reporting mostly national news and climbs back into bed with Cas, turning his back on him, pushing his face into the pillow to listen to the static pop and crackle of a nervous anchor's voice.  
  


Cas lies next to him, his eyes heavy, and rests a comforting hand on the space between Dean's shoulder-blades. He can almost see the hope draining from Dean's body, whispering away like clouds of smoke from his skin. He's done all he can to protect them from what's coming, Cas knows, and it stirs a pain in his heart to think that Dean is finally coming to terms with the fact that there is nothing left for him to do.  
  


For a while he tries to read the book that Dean had abandoned the day before, but the text swims in front of his eyes until he puts it down again. Hour by hour, the view out the window becomes darker and blacker and harder, and he almost wonders how dark it can get before something has to give.  
  


Restless, he gets up to see if Sam is awake, and leans into the doorway of the skylight room. Inside it is pitch black save for a thin near-invisible sliver of blue light that rests across the forehead and nose and mouth of him, sitting up against the headboard, staring up at the skylight, unmoving. He doesn't seem to notice that Castiel is there, and Cas doesn't bother him. Only stands, leaning against the jamb, the cold of the floor creeping through his bare feet like a tree shooting upwards, keeping watch, until it is too cold to stand alone and he goes back to the warmth of Dean in his bed and presses himself gently against him, breathes the smell of his skin.  
  


The impenetrable wall of night comes, eventually. The radio warns in frantic tones that water levels in the Atlantic are rising dramatically. No one, it says, no one can account for the cause of such an impossible and universal storm. No science, it says. There's no science for this.  
  


Even when the rare so-called expert is given precious air-time to talk about the rumoured Flood, there is no triumph in their voice. There are less and less of those detours from the event at hand anymore. People speak with panic twisting up their tongues, so obviously trying to remain professional and aloof, and so obviously failing, too. They all agree that something is coming. They all agree that the world is afraid.  
  


There is a loud noise from downstairs, late at night, that wakes Cas, as if something has been pushed heavily into a wall. The water must be rising on the floor. Lifting anything not weighed down. Uneasy, he settles back against Dean, who hasn't moved for hours, stiff with empty dreams, and tries to sleep again.  
  


* * *

  
  


The lights downstairs go out entirely the next morning, plunging the stairwell into darkness.  
  


Dean rouses Sam from his trance in the skylight room to go down with him and with Cas one last time, flashlights held tight in their hands, to wade through the three inches of standing water on the floor and haul the last of the sandbags out of the storage closet and up onto the stairs. It takes hours, and tricky handling of the lights to keep from dropping them. The Maglites coast eerily over the glittering chrome and slick paint of the fire trucks where, only nights before, Dean and Cas had sat and talked.  
  


Dean packs the sandbags halfway up the stairwell, tight against the close-fitting walls, building up a makeshift barrier between the higher and lower levels. The burlap is coarse and smells wet and is heavy as anything.  
  


Through the gaps that he's filling Dean can see, occasionally, by flashlight, one of the Impala's wheels, blocked up and left there to be consumed by the rising tide, and he feels sick to his stomach at it. He covers up her last silver image as quickly as he can, divides the firehouse into two blocks of quiet, and retreats upstairs again.  
  


It feels a bit too much like walling up a tomb.  
  


* * *

  
  


There are a great many empty spaces in a day with nothing in them, and Dean is beginning to realise that they have always been there, as long as he's been alive—but they've passed him by, consumed with thoughts of other things, and he has never had the chance to dwell in them, make use of them. It puzzles him, how he could have missed their existence. For years he's been in a state of perpetual motion, first with Sam, and then with Sam and Cas—whole days spent on the road in near-silence, long lonely nights in motel rooms, fruitless frustrating hunts that had afforded them plenty of opportunity to sit and think, and yet he'd never actually used them that way.  
  


He thinks, now, that if he'd known those pockets of time existed, he might have figured things out with Cas ages ago. Maybe even as early as the night that Cas had flown apart into pieces in Chuck Shurley's living room. But he'd filled up that time with meaningless noise in his head, always pushing towards the next nearest goal, never pausing to consider things like love when it came to things like Castiel.  
  


It really _isn't_ fair. That it took them this long to get it out in the open, that it took them this long to understand it for themselves, and now they don't even have the time to see it through properly. He can count the number of times they've kissed—shyly, as if it's a new concept to them, and with hesitation—on one hand, and they won't ever have the opportunity to practise that, to get it right. He likes kissing Castiel, and he knows he would have liked it a year ago, too, and a year before that, if he'd only been smart enough to see that he _could._ And he likes the pleasant weight of Cas at his back in bed, because it's familiar; he's known it for years, every other night, but now he knows that he can touch Cas, too, that he'll have a reason for it, that they can press their heads together on a pillow and there won't be anything mysterious in why it feels so good. And he likes that the shift has been slight, that he doesn't have to think of Cas as a _lover_ , that they're still _friends_ instead of something heavier, and that the label doesn't have to bend and bow away from the kissing or the sleeping or the touching, that they just _fit_ into one another in a way they always have, really. They just hadn't known it fully.  
  


It's almost like some sick cosmic joke, that they've come to their senses just in time to lose one another entirely. So he savours it, as much as he can. Makes use of those increasingly empty spaces in the day to look at Cas, and catalogue him, all the things he likes the most about him. All the things he loves. He knows Cas is doing the same.  
  


They're in single-digit days. He has a lot he wants to say, to Cas, to Sam. Everything but _goodbye._ He doesn't know how to go about it, though. How to broach subjects like that.  
  


What he ends up saying, that night, is, “You mean a lot to me, Cas,” while they're facing one another, cramped into the space only meant for one body on Dean's bed. He can't see him in the dark, but the backs of Cas' fingers are resting against his cheek, and their breath is intermingling between them.  
  


Cas makes a small humming noise in his throat and shifts closer.  
  


Dean swallows. “Fought a lot of wars together,” he says, though it isn't what he means to say. “You know.”  
  


Cas doesn't move. Lightning strikes and he waits until the thunder passes to reply.  
  


“We're not soldiers anymore,” he says.  
  


“Then what are we?”  
  


A suggestion of movement in the black, and Dean feels Cas' lips brush gently against his cheek, across his mouth, as if he's still trying to get a feel for the fact that he can do this.  
  


“Things that die,” he says.  
  


* * *

  
  


“What are we going to do?”  
  


The sound of Sam's voice startles both Dean and Cas, trying to scrape something halfway decent together for a meal, and Dean turns to see him where he stands in the doorway of his pitch-black room.  
  


His eyes are raw and red and he doesn't look as if he's truly slept, and he's holding his arms close to his chest as if afraid his ribs will fall apart if he doesn't keep them together.  
  


“What do you mean?” Dean says.  
  


Sam pulls nervously at the skin beneath his eyes and pushes his shoulder into the doorjamb. He looks jittery, unstable. The door seems to be the only thing keeping him upright.  
  


“When the water rises,” Sam says. His voice is hoarse and comes from the back of his throat and trembling in it are fear and anxiety and the sound of the daze he's been in since they pulled the sandbags up the stairs. “Where are we going to go?”  
  


Dean sets his jaw, and Cas quietly puts down the knife he's holding, looking at the taut line of Dean's shoulders, waiting for the answer.  
  


“We're staying here, Sammy,” he says, gently but firmly. “That's always been the plan.”  
  


“It's going to get higher than the firehouse.”  
  


“You don't know that.”  
  


“I do,” Sam says, with perfect gravity, and Cas feels a chill deep inside him. “I do know that.”  
  


He can see the _how?_ lying on Dean's shoulders, unsaid.  
  


“When it covers this place and we're trapped, or washed away, or carried off,” Sam says. “What are we going to do?”  
  


There's a long, long silence, broken only by the crackle of the radio, the howl of the storm.  
  


“Kick for the surface,” Dean says.  
  


He straightens his shoulders, pulls himself up as much as he can. For an instant, the hopelessness on Sam's face lifts just the smallest bit, like a veil being drawn away—for an instant Cas sees again the look that means _Dean can do anything, Dean can save anyone, Dean will always, always know what to do._  
  
  


Inevitably, the veil falls again, and Sam takes his answer back into the dark without acknowledgment, and when, a few hours later, Cas goes in to check on him, he finds him lying curled up on his bed beneath the shuddering outline of the skylight, covering his face with his hands, crying silently, and he sits on Sam's bed for a long time with a hand on the poor boy's shoulder and knows he can't say anything that will make it alright.

* * *

 

They push their beds together, the metal feet screeching on the floor, and they don't talk about what they want to do; they simply do it. The greenish fluorescent lights are turned off and Dean and Castiel fumble blindly for each other beneath the heavy covers, glad to have space to spread out in. Cas isn't sure why—a restless need to touch and be touched, to find something solid to grab onto while the streets fill and run like rivers—but he doesn't think too hard about it, either. Dean kisses his mouth before he can fall asleep, and then he is kissing back, and searching for Dean's face to grasp in the dark, and Dean's hands are flat against his chest, pushing the soft fabric of his T-shirt against his skin, and their feet are cold and knocking against one another beneath the blankets. Time doesn't move the same way when there's nothing to be seen. It's either seconds or hours later when Cas slides his leg between Dean's, pushes against him, hard and uncomfortable and awkward until the hardness and the awkwardness are worked out of him and it only feels good. Good and safe and steady and Dean's hands on his hips, mouths pressed together, missing one another's lips as many times as they find them, totally sightless. Like clutching one another at the bottom of the Marianas trench, all the soundless pressure of miles and miles of water beating down on them, the curl and fall of the rain, the heaviness of their bodies, until Cas gives a soft sound into Dean's mouth and Dean swallows it and Cas comes, hot and sticky, against his own stomach, and stops moving.  
  


They lie there, breathing, unable to see where to move to place a kiss, another half-hearted drag of the hips. A strange combination of embarrassment and sadness and a simple need to entwine themselves together like two raindrops sliding down a plane of glass and joining and falling away. Cas can't tell if this is what someone would call _too much too soon,_ and tries not to care, tries to fit himself perfectly into the crook of Dean's arm, touch the heated flush of his face wherever it's hiding in the black.  
  


He wishes they could lie here forever, never speaking, only breathing, safe and sound. But they can't.  
  


They sleep, or they try to. Some deep part of them both is ashamed, though they have no reason to be. Before he drifts away Cas feels Dean's lips on his forehead, and then the hollows of his eyes against the crown of his skull, and the wet heat of tears coming down as if to baptise him.

* * *

 

  
  


There are four days left. Dean stands at the window, leaning his head against the cold glass, watching Hyannis and Nebraska and the whole god-forsaken world change, like a series of curtains falling, into deeper and deeper shades of blackness. The radio keeps talking as if enough words will keep the end at bay. The storm, somehow, gets louder and louder, stronger and stronger. He watches signposts, shadow-shapes on the blue streets, being torn from their posts by the force of the wind. Downstairs past the sandbag barricade the huge metal garage doors are buckling and crashing in their holdings as the water rushes by, higher, higher. The curbs and the sidewalks are rolling with streams, rapids, downhill into the plains, flattening grass and gardens, roiling in eddies around manhole covers and corners. Preparing the way for the broken coasts and seashores. Readying the land, like hands smoothing over upturned ground, for the ocean to surge in, when it comes.  
  


* * *

  
  


Three days left. Cas turns the radio off. The constant repetition of the same panicked voices over and over is beginning to grind against his bones like the gears of a machine. In the half-quiet that falls in its place, he feels surrounded, caught.  
  


Dean is sleeping fitfully; he draws a blanket over him, kisses the top of his head.  
  


He has to take a flashlight into the skylight room to have any hope of seeing Sam in the utter abyssal blackness. Sam, who hasn't eaten in the last two days and, as far as he can tell, hasn't moved from his bed, either. He's scaring him, frankly; he's scaring Dean, too. He's been sitting in here, listless and pale, watching the sky move and darken and turn slate-black through the opening in the ceiling. The last time he tried to get up, the night before, he'd stumbled so violently that he'd slammed into a wall and crumpled there, as if reeling on the tipping deck of a ship, and Dean had had to pull him up bodily, his legs too unsteady to hold him.  
  


Cas doesn't say anything when he goes in. He makes his way to the bed and sits down on it, flashlight illuminating little circles of Sam, but never all. Sam doesn't speak, either, but shifts a little bit as if to make room for him, and Cas pulls himself up against the headboard beside him and they sit there for a while, uneasy company.  
  


“Are you still dreaming?” Cas says, very gently, breaking the silence in two.  
  


Sam is still for a long time. Then, “Yeah.”  
  


“Worse than before?”  
  


“Much worse.”  
  


Cas searches for his hand in the dark and holds it, loosely, in his own. With surprising strength Sam clutches back, fingers pinning Castiel's to his palm, and he squeezes it tight.  
  


“It feels like everything's moving back and forth,” Sam says in a whisper, and Cas thinks it sounds as if he might cry. “It doesn't stop.”  
  


“Like—rocking?”  
  


“Like waves.”  
  


Sam lays his head down meekly on Castiel's shoulder like a little child pushing into the safety of their mother's body, and Cas lets him.  
  


“I'm sorry,” he says.  
  


“I'm afraid,” Sam whispers in reply. “I'm afraid.”  
  


* * *

  
  


Dean is sitting in the stairwell when Cas wakes the next morning and carefully circumnavigates the hole in the floor through which the fireman's pole rises to pour a cup of coffee from the percolator. Down in the first floor it's black as ink, and when—the night before—he'd experimentally shone a Maglite down into its depths he had seen water a good foot up the wall, and creeping higher every hour.  
  


Padding on bare feet across the freezing cold floor, Cas goes to him, stands behind him.  
  


The stairwell is as dark as everything else downstairs, the wall of sandbags a hulking half-completed shadow a few steps down. Dean is holding a flashlight between his knees, pointed down at the bottom of the barricade.  
  


The step, Cas sees, is slowly turning a muddy brown. Water is coming through.  
  


In the stairwell the sound of the storm is lesser—a dull roar rather than the endless torrent that pounds against the roof while they sleep. But it's still there, a sound like static in the backs of their minds.  
  


“Three days left, huh,” Dean says, without emotion.  
  


Cas sits down on the step next to him. It's a tight fit. Warily, he watches the water creep beneath the sandbags, still a ways down below them; it won't reach them for a long time. But it's there, and it's coming.  
  


“Three days,” he echoes.  
  


“I don't want to die,” Dean says, and turns his face to him.  
  


Cas returns his look, honestly, openly. Gently he reaches up, lets his hand rest on the back of Dean's neck, in comfort.  
  


“I know,” he says. “I don't either.”  
  


“Man,” Dean says, unfolding his legs restlessly, shaking his shoulders out and turning his head away, “this isn't how it was supposed to go.”  
  


Cas doesn't say anything. He watches Dean bite at his lower lip in the dim cast-off of the flashlight.  
  


“I always thought we were gonna—I don't know. We were gonna die like hunters die, you know, bloody, in a fight. Or in a fucking car accident or something, not—not holed up like rats in some godforsaken ghost town, not— _drowning_.” He looks down, picks at his fingernails. “I mean, that—that I was prepared for, I was always prepared to die on the job, or die on the road. You kind of build up a closure for that kind of thing after a while. But I don't—I don't have that for this.”  
  


He looks at Cas again, and Cas—unable to do anything else—looks back.  
  


“I don't have it in me,” Dean says softly, “to sit back and wait for you and Sammy and everyone else in the world to die, and not do anything about it. I'm not wired that way.”  
  


“You did everything you thought you could.”  
  


“Yeah.” Dean looks away again, back at the creeping water, just a few feet below them. Cold as ice and coming. “Yeah, and that's jack-shit.”  
  


Thunder. Dean glances up, behind them, towards Sam's room, where he's been quiet and unmoving for hours, and Cas can see on his face, even dimly, how hopeless he is, now. How frightened, how cold.  
  


For a long time they are quiet there in the stairwell together.  
  


“Will there be Heaven?” Dean asks, then, his voice surprisingly small. “After all this?”  
  


Cas hasn't been in contact with Heaven in years. Hasn't even thought about it in months except to imagine his brothers and sisters pulling the lever that started all this and set the Flood in motion. And he finds he doesn't know the answer to that question, not really. He has no idea what's happened up there since he left, if it's even functional, if, by some machinations, the angels plan on destroying Heaven along with the Earth, and consigning themselves to oblivion where, at last, they can rest.  
  


“I don't know,” he says. “But I hope so.”  
  


That, he thinks, would be a comfort. If he had that, if he could hold on to something like the certainty of an afterlife for the three of them, he thinks he could gladly lie down and die. The truth is, he's tired too, and though the brothers cling to life like nothing he's ever seen he knows they are tired as well. They've all been running from so many things for so long, or hurtling into them headfirst.  
  


If Heaven waits for them, maybe they, too, can rest.  
  


“Yeah,” Dean says. “Yeah, me too.”  
  


After another long time of quiet he turns, and kisses Castiel, gently, hand resting on his shoulder.  
  


“I love you,” he says, with perfect earnestness, without fanfare or expectation. “Like a brother, like—like family. And whatever else there is. I love you, Cas, you know that, right?”  
  


Cas nods, searching his face, his wide green eyes. “Yes,” he says. “I know. I love you too.”  
  


Dean's eyelids flicker, and he nods too, and then he stands and goes back into the upper room. He leaves the flashlight rolling precariously on the top step.  
  


For a while Cas remains in the stairwell, eyes fixed on the line of seeping water pushing and testing their meager barricade, until it becomes unbearable, until it becomes a nausea in his stomach and a heavy uncertainty in his breast. He gets up, too. He can't face it anymore.  
  


* * *

  
  


The day before the end of the world dawns, or perhaps it doesn't. The sun doesn't show itself to clarify the end of night and the beginning of day. There is nothing extraordinary about the last full morning, nothing new about the sky or the storm. When Dean and Cas wake in their pushed-together bed they don't get up. They lie there, tangled up with each other, neither speaking nor looking at one another. Trying, almost, to gather up the warmth of the bed and the sheets and the pillow and hold it in the middle of their chests, for when the true dark cold breaks in. Hours from now. How can that be?  
  


It's only when Sam comes out of his room, a few hours into the afternoon, swaying on his feet and pushing against the wall for leverage, that they sit up, startled by his appearance.  
  


He doesn't look at them; he makes his uneasy way towards the counter where the wireless radio sits, turned off, antenna still pointing up to the ceiling.  
  


“Sammy?” Dean says, getting out of bed and going to him. He looks as if he's about to collapse any minute. “Are you okay?”  
  


Sam doesn't say anything, but leans heavily into Dean's receiving hands when they come to rest on his side and shoulder.  
  


With shaking hands he reaches out and turns on the radio and the room is filled with the blank hum of static.  
  


“Where are the anchors?” Cas says, softly.  
  


Sam picks up the radio and lets Dean maneuver him to the floor; trying to reach the bed seems like a bad idea. Cas gets up, too, and sits down next to Sam on the cold concrete, a little ways away from their picture-perfect stacks of food, the radio on the ground between them.  
  


Dean turns the dial experimentally, trying to find a station that will speak to them, but finds only static. Confused, he looks up at Sam. Sam's eyes are directed at the floor, dazed and weighted down with weariness and anxiety.  
  


Uncertain of what else to do, they sit there—Sam leaning against Dean, pulling nervously and constantly at the skin of his arms, and Cas thinks of the vertigo he'd mentioned and wonders how bad it is now that they are only hours out from the end. Gently, he reaches out and places a hand on Sam's knee, and Sam closes his eyes.  
  


Hours must pass.  
  


Cas isn't sure how many. There's no clock up here; previously they'd used Dean's watch and the radio to tell the time, but Dean's watch gave out two nights ago, and now the radio is silent. It's eerie. Where for weeks there had been incessant sound on the airwaves—first the chattering sounds of ravens, then the pretentious voices of the people who had picked up Dean's message and called it their own, and then the fear of the reporters when the storm had come—now there is only the mute crushed sound of emptiness, and it fills up Castiel's mouth and head like air.  
  


When a voice finally does break the constant white noise, it shocks Castiel like electricity jumping into his spine.  
  


It's a woman, the sound of her muffled and broken but still coming through, and she's saying something about the East Coast, _now we go live to,_ but he can't catch the name. There is a break in the sound and then a crackling metallic man's voice, loudly and frantically describing the weather; in the faint background Cas can hear what sounds like sirens.  
  


Dean looks at Sam, who doesn't move. He stares at the radio with a look on his face that seems to say, _wait._  
  
  


Cas can't tell what the anchor is saying; he's talking too quickly. He's terrified, Cas can tell by his voice, and all he can catch are words like _New York_ and _evacuate_ and _higher ground_ and _ocean levels_ and, once, _oh God, oh God._  
  
  


They're all leaning in over the radio now, straining to hear what he's saying. Certainly panic had been the norm on the radio for the last several days, but this is panic of a different kind. This is last-minute panic, the kind that throws people into their cars to escape the seaside as the hurricane is moving in overhead, the kind that hurls people into storm cellars as the tornado carves its way through the road.  
  


Distantly, in some far-off East Coast studio, a scream. A woman's scream. A burst of loud static, as if something has exploded. A piercing sound, a guttural roar like a helicopter's blades. Three more static bursts.  
  


A loud _thud,_ as if someone has dropped the microphone. The sirens, louder. Static bursts now like rapid lightning strikes, popping and crackling and fizzling through the radio's speakers. Screams.  
  


“Jesus Christ,” Dean whispers.  
  


And then—an almighty sound. A roar unlike anything Castiel has ever heard. The sound of some abyss, pulling back on itself, rising to rush forward, the sound of tectonic plates and the shifting Earth, a growl, and it grows and grows, intensifies, louder and louder until it becomes almost unbearable, almost unspeakably huge, eating up the airspace, dissolving the shouts and screams and sirens as if scattering dust to the wind, and then—  
  


A long, low, piercing tone.  
  


On and on and on. Like the collapsing line of a heart monitor: an endless steady note, on and on and on.  
  


Sam reaches down and turns the radio off. His hands are trembling violently.  
  


Castiel's heart seems to have dropped out of him. He feels frozen, unable to move, unable to breathe quite properly, either, the tone still ringing in his head.  
  


“It's starting,” Sam says.  
  


Slowly, Dean covers his face with his hands.  
  


* * *

  
  


“Sammy.”  
  


Sam looks up from where he's lying, curled up into the smallest possible ball in the skylight room. Dean's just a shadow in the doorway.  
  


“Come out here,” Dean says softly. “You're not sleeping in here tonight.”  
  


The thought of standing up again makes Sam want to cry. He can feel the Flood, deep down in his bones, and it shifts and moves and surges with every minute motion of his body, harsher and more grating the longer the night pushes on. Like sandpaper scraping against his marrow, back and forth, back and forth, every minute worse and worse.  
  


He doesn't want to say _I can't get up_ out loud, but Dean knows him, and understands his silence.  
  


“Come on,” he says, venturing into the dark. He leans down and Sam feels for his shoulder, finds it, grips it tight even though it sends waves and waves through him. Unsteadily, Dean helps him up, slings an arm around his waist.  
  


The other room is dark, too, and Dean half-carries him through the doorway, guiding him towards the makeshift bed he and Cas have made. Cas is there, then, and keeps a palm up near Sam's shoulder until Sam is lying down, face flushed with embarrassment, his hands shaking violently.  
  


“Sorry,” he says, as if there's something to apologise for.  
  


Dean lies down in the middle, without ceremony, and gathers them up to him—pulls Sam close and Cas, too, and Sam rests his head on Dean's shoulder and Cas rests his on Dean's chest.  
  


The night is long. Somewhere, in the vast empty wasteland dark, the ocean is coming.  
  


* * *

  
  


Dean can't sleep. He's known for ages that, when it came to it, he wouldn't be able to sleep on the last night of the world, and so this is not a surprise to him.  
  


He lies, shoulders propped up a little on the headboard, with his broken little family clinging to him in their dreams. He isn't sure how they managed to fall asleep, but he's glad they did. He's glad he gets to hold them like this. It'll probably be the last time.  
  


Quietly he tilts his head to kiss Sam's temple, and then to kiss Castiel's brow. Their faces are uneasy while they sleep. Castiel's hand is curled into a fist around his T-shirt; Sam's hand is resting on his wrist. He can feel them breathing against his side, can dimly see Sam's eyes twitching behind their lids.  
  


He hopes he's dreaming of good things. Not of dying, not of floods, but good things. He hopes he's dreaming about Jessica Moore, or one of the million times they laughed together on the road, leaving their happiness scattered out across the country in their wake. He hopes he's dreaming of being happy and safe.  
  


A terrible part of him almost wishes they—all of them—could die in their sleep tonight, before the water even comes, to spare themselves the sight of it. The Flood devouring everyone they have ever saved, every town they've ever rescued, every byway and highway they've ever driven through. The Flood creeping slowly through the night, the encroaching beast, consuming.  
  


It's not fair. Over and over his mind comes back to that— _it's not fair._ Only years ago they'd stopped Armageddon with nothing but their bare hands and the chance brightness of Sam's bravery and love; they'd saved the whole wretched planet from ruination at the hands of archangels. For what, now? Now it's all being washed away, slowly, relentlessly. Soon enough that oblivion will be here, too, Hyannis, Nebraska, where they fled from that same responsibility the second time, where Dean only has the barest hope they will be able to survive.  
  


He thinks, _look at what I have._ He has his brother, who only months ago had had hope for some kind of future, and a smile as bright as the day itself. He has Castiel, his best friend, the best friend he could ever have hoped for, a best friend who _loves_ him, whom he loves in return. And they've kissed and confessed and held one another as much as they could in the time they were given but it wasn't enough. He realises now that no amount of time would have been enough to hold the years he wants to give to Castiel, of gratitude and friendship and love and anything else besides, everything else besides.  
  


He wants that. Now that he knows those things could have been his he wants them so badly he could almost burst apart.  
  


They could have had a life, all three of them. They could have found that impossible goodness at the end of the road and stayed there, been happy, been safe. They had been moving in that direction for so long, and now it's gone—erased from possibility. And all he has now are their bodies tucked in close to his, and his arms around them.  
  


He swallows hard, and shifts down, letting his head rest flat on the pillow, pulling them as close as he can, and he closes his eyes—not to sleep, but to let the sound of the storm above wash over him, and imagine for one more moment that he can protect his family from anything if he only loves them enough.  
  


_We can live,_ he thinks, letting the foolish thought emerge to the forefront of his mind, where he tries his very, very hardest to imagine that it is true. _We are made of stone._  
  
  


* * *

  
  


_He's lying in a hard-springed bed in a cold, cold firehouse in an empty town. He's not alone. Two star-eyed shadows are lying here with him and all their hands are clasped._   
  
  


_It's morning. He doesn't know how he knows; there is no sunlight, no light at all to give passage through the darkness. From far, far above his head, something calls his name._   
  
  


_He gets up, releasing Dean's shadow-hand. It falls to charcoal pieces when he lets it go. Slowly he stands, gaining his balance on the concrete floor. Up. His fingers are sparkling with lightning. He has to go up._   
  
  


_He goes into the skylight room and stands on the bed. It rocks and sways beneath him but he steadies himself with a hand against the roof. The room is the colour of India ink. He feels upward, his lightning fingers casting just enough glow to see by, and finds the latch of the skylight, and pulls it. He pushes the square glass dome up, up, and rain begins to pour in, but it is silent and does not seem to hit the floor._   
  


_With his forearms he heaves himself up through the hole and onto the flat roof, immediately soaked to the bone. Lightning shivers up him, curling around his shoulders like a cat. The sound of the storm is deafening, pounding and hammering past his ears, and everything is darkness. He looks up. The sky is taut and embryonic and pulsing with veins, clouds choking and curling and rolling like steam or smoke._   
  
  


_From behind him, the sound of his name. But he cannot turn to look. He can feel It coming, advancing, flattening the Earth, but he cannot turn to see it. His body is frozen. His fingers are sparking and leaping with electricity. He tries to open his mouth to call Dean's name, or Castiel's, but no sound comes out. He stands, immobile, on the rooftop, chilled to the core, drenched beyond recognition, but he cannot turn. He cannot, for the life of him, turn around._   
  


* * *

  
  


Dean wakes to the sound of metal grating and a sudden rush of noise from the skylight room, and starts up. Cas opens his eyes almost immediately, sitting upright.  
  


“What is it?” he whispers, in the black.  
  


Dean feels an emptiness at his left. Sam is gone.  
  


“Sam,” he says. And then he calls it, loud: “Sammy?”  
  


There's no answer. Dean scrambles out of bed, snatching a flashlight from the countertop, and Cas is following when he steps in something cold and wet and looks down.  
  


Water is running in a steady stream from the inside of the skylight room, curving around his bare feet.  
  


“Dean,” he says, and Dean looks, and together they go into Sam's room, into the roaring sound of rain pouring in from the open skylight.  
  


“ _Sam_?” Dean shouts. He looks frantically at Cas, who doesn't hesitate. He climbs onto Sam's bed, the covers soaked through with freezing water, and hoists himself up through the skylight.  
  


It is impossible to hear anything over the howl and roar of the storm, and almost impossible to see Sam, once he's found his footing on the slick rooftop. Sam is nearly invisible, a blue and black smudge against the angry churning sky; he's standing stock-still, staring back, over Cas' shoulder, and Cas picks his way to him over vents and metal boxes.  
  


He hears Dean land on the roof as well, and together they go to him, slipping and skidding on the rain, Dean still clutching his flashlight as if it will help him somehow. When they reach Sam, Dean grabs onto him, grasps his arm in his fingers, and shakes him.  
  


“What the hell are you doing up here?” he shouts over the roar, but Sam doesn't look at him. His hazel eyes are fixed, dreamlike, on a point on the horizon, far away.  
  


“It's coming,” he says.  
  


Dean stares at him, and Cas watches his face slowly fall, horrified.  
  


It takes all his strength to turn his head and see.  
  


In the distance, almost indistinguishable from the greater dark, there is a wall of blackness so intense that it seems to bite the sky down into itself, and there is a great growling, as if the Earth itself were speaking, and second by second the wall is getting—taller. Coming closer. Rolling out, feeling forward over the far-off plains and prairies in the east with long tendrils of darkness.  
  


Sam seems to come abruptly out of his trance and says only one thing: “Dean?” His voice is small and terrified and horribly, horribly hopeful, as if, somehow, even now, Dean can fix this—Dean can speak the magic word and all of this will vanish. He buckles, a little, and Dean and Cas grab him, hold him up, pull him back to his own two feet, and they stand, all three, clinging to each other. Watching it come.  
  


Cas can't think of anything to say. He clutches Sam, reaches out for Dean, and Dean finds his wet wrist and grasps it tight. He cannot tear his eyes away from the black, black wall of water, coming, coming, relentless and enormous.  
  


“Kick for the surface,” Dean is saying, over and over, only barely audible over the roar and the whip of the wind. “When it hits you kick for the surface. Do you hear me?”  
  


“Dean,” Sam says again, his lower lip trembling, and Dean grips them both tight, tighter than he's ever held them before.  
  


“Just kick for the surface,” he says, shouts, “just kick for the surface and you'll be okay. You'll be okay, Sammy.” And he says it over and over and over, again and again, as if imbuing it with power, performing a spell, making it true.  
  


A single flash of lightning stammers off the massive expanse of the water, veins of foam illuminated in a blinding instant—and then there is the enormous sound of something crashing, the groan of a building collapsing—and the firehouse is jarred on its foundations, throwing them to the shuddering rooftop, and water hurtles past them through the street, casting off spray against the tops of houses. The wall is coming down.  
  


“Hold on,” Dean shouts, helplessly, desperately, grabbing at Sam's sleeve and Castiel's arm, yanking them in close to him. “Hold on, just hold on—”  
  


He can feel the whole world shaking beneath them, rumbling, coming undone, and for just one more bare instant Dean looks towards Castiel—Castiel, clinging to Sam, hair blown backwards by the wind, blue eyes fixed on the Flood coming, coming, and he almost imagines that to kiss Castiel now would be to create some infinite, eternal loop of breath—that like this they could survive—but this is foolish, he thinks, this is a foolish desire, for kissing Castiel has never made him anything other than breathless.  
  


He buries his face into Sam's shoulder.  
  


The water crashes in.  
  


* * *

  
  


They are thrown from the rooftop into the hurtling sea, devouring the streets of Hyannis, and when Dean plunges into the floodwaters the sudden silence is almost a relief—no more drumming of rain or howling of wind; only the deep muted roar of the ocean. But then he tries to breathe, and chokes on water, and panic sets in.  
  


He's blind, freezing, alone, and he can feel his lungs squeezing and knows he doesn't have enough air. He feels his arm outward desperately, fingers reaching, trying to grab onto something, anything, anyone, knows he can't make for the surface until he's got Sam and Cas again, he can't, he won't.  
  


Something latches around his middle and he grabs for it—Castiel's arm. It pulls up on him and he moves with it, twists in the roiling churning water, his belly going concave, starving for air—dimly he can see something on Castiel's other side, pressed against him, long hair waving like sea grass. Sam. It's Sam. Somehow he held onto Sam.  
  


The water hurls and pushes them, thrusts them forward and heaves them back, constant motion, and Dean grabs hold of Cas as best he can, fists a hand in Sam's shirt. For a split second, his forehead rests against Castiel's, streams of trapped air billowing upward from between them, and Cas looks at him as if he's the brightest beacon in the world.  
  


_Do what you have to,_ he seems to say. _Try._  
  


Dean holds them as tightly as he can, heavy as they are, and lifts his face towards the faintest suggestion of light.  
  


Spots are flashing at the corners of his eyes. With the last of his strength, he pulls them up, begins to kick for the surface, pushing, desperately and finally, upward towards the air.


End file.
